Program note about Ravel's Boléro:   he wrote it as an exercise in orchestration. Starting out with a fairly straightforward melodic line and a relentlessly repetitive rhythm, he thought of it as "a study in boredom." He set himself to the task of trying to make it musically interesting by altering the orchestration with every repetition of the theme. After setting it to a bunch of different arrangements, he ran out of gas. He'd managed to drag it out for over fifteen minutes, and decided, "Gawd! That's enough of that!!"

The first time it was played in public, Paris, 1928, the audience went a bit nuts. Ravel was surprised, amazed, amused, and a bit mystified. He still regarded it as "a study in boredom."

Further note:   

Ravel once commented, "I have written only one masterpiece. That is the Boléro. Unfortunately, it contains no music." This bon mot expresses the idea that the musical content of the Boléro is not very interesting:   a simple melody is repeated over and over during a 17 minute crescendo. The reason it is a masterpiece is it keeps our rapt attention through the use of extraordinary orchestration. The tone colors are so fascinating and exquisite that the simple modulation from C major to E major at the very end of the piece comes as a breathtaking surprise. Boléro was composed as a ballet for the famed ballerina Ida Rubinstein. The story of the ballet is set in a bar, where a voluptuous dancer stomps and whirls on the tables, exciting the men in the bar until a violent knife fight erupts. A story is told that just after the premiere, a woman in the audience pointed at Ravel and shouted that he was mad. Ravel smiled and said that she truly understood the work.

A few years back, while in a music store rummaging through the records, I noticed a well-dressed, distinguished looking gentleman also looking through the records. Hanging on his arm he had a stereotypical petite thingy with a squeaky, little-girl voice. She looked to be a suicide blonde (dyed by her own hand), wore a blouse that displayed a rather magnificent fo'c'sle, a cleavage that could cause one to dwell on the joys of burrowing like a mole, and a pair of shapely legs amply revealed by a tight skirt that came all the way up to Jericho. I wasn't listening to their conversation, but I couldn't help but overhear some of her comments and it occurred to me that she probably wasn't a nuclear physicist. Sugar-daddy and his bimbo, perhaps? Anyway, the clerk put a record on the store's music system and the sounds of Ravel's Boléro began throbbing through the place. "OH!" squeaked the girl, her little voice piping through the shop like an air-raid siren. "Listen to that!" "Yes," responded the man. "Ravel's Boléro." "Oh, nooooo!" said the girl, "that's the theme from '10'!"

His eyes and mine met. I smile sympathetically. He rolled his eyes and sighed deeply. We went our separate ways. But I couldn't feel too sorry for him. The young lady may not have been top-rate in the intellectual acumen department, but she had her good points. Yes, she certainly did.

Don Firth