Music Monday: Bolero

The boléro is a type of Spanish dance, but this is Music Monday, not Dance Monday, so I have a specific boléro in mind, perhaps the most famous of them all: Maurice Ravel’s 1928 composition, which he originally wrote as accompaniment for a ballet. He considered the piece experimental, something that would repeat on different orchestral levels, but nothing more than that. Audiences would be paying attention to the dancers, not the music, right, so who cares? A lot of people, it seems. The piece was hugely popular, and it remains his most recognized work.

Ravel’s Boléro was originally over 17 minutes long, and given that it is, for the most part, a repetition of the same couple of musical themes over and over on different instruments, some devotees of classical music have little patience for it. One such devotee was my music appreciation teacher in school. To him, Ravel’s Boléro was dull, boring, and repetitive, and not something he would listen to for pleasure. Then one day, I introduced him to Isao Tomita.

Japanese composer/musician Isao Tomita has had a long and varied career, but his particular niche seems to be arranging classical music for modern electronic instruments. My Dad first came across Tomita one night in the early to mid seventies while watching a documentary on television. They played a piece of electronic music in the background, and he was so taken with it, he wrote the television studio that produced the documentary asking what it was. They told him it was from an album by Tomita called “Snowflakes Are Dancing,” a collection of synthesizer interpretations of Debussy’s piano music. Dad hunted down the album, and became a fan, collecting every album Tomita made for the next ten years. The idea of using anything but acoustic instruments for classical music is, of course, abject heresy to the purist. While my Dad appreciated the classics, he was by no means a purist, and I’m glad to say he passed that legacy down to his children.

As my music appreciation teacher discovered that day, Tomita’s interpretations are incredibly imaginative. Not only does his work display skill as a musician, but he treats the recording as a performance, paying close attention to where sounds are within the audio picture, making use of Quadrophonic (early surround sound) mixing, and bouncing tunes between the left and right speakers for effect. I still marvel at the sounds he was able to get from his equipment without the benefit of sampling and advanced digital technology. After playing him Tomita’s Boléro, my teacher said it was the best and most interesting version he’d ever heard.

Tomita’s rendition of Ravel’s Boléro is over 9 minutes long (shorter than the original), but it’s one of those pieces that keeps your attention and makes those 9 minutes pass quickly. I recommend you listen to it through speakers (preferably 5.1 surround, but stereo will do), somewhere where you’ll have peace and quiet for 10 minutes to just sit and enjoy it.

About six and a half minutes in, the bass suddenly becomes a lot more prominent. When this record first came out (it was released as a 12″ single in 1979, and then subsequently on Tomita’s collection of Ravel pieces called “Daphnis and Cloe”), my Dad was working in a consumer electronics store. He would use Tomita’s Boléro to demo speakers, particularly at this point in the track. He would light a match and hold it in front of the speaker; you could see the flame dance to the thumping bass (he claimed that bass could put the match out).

My favorite moment of the whole piece comes about seven and a half minutes in, near the end, where it briefly modulates from C-major to E-major. Tomita makes much of this moment, building everything up to a crescendo, creating one of those heart-soaring moments that makes you sigh.

Ravel’s Boléro had a bit of a revival in 1984 when British ice dancers Torvill and Dean used it in their legendary gold medal winning performance in the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, though their plans to use the piece nearly ran afoul of the contest rules. It seems according to the rules, the performance had to be four minutes long, give or take ten seconds. As I mentioned before, Ravel’s original piece is over 17 minutes long. Torvill and Dean found someone to do a shorter arrangement for them, but they couldn’t condense it down to less than 4 minutes and 28 seconds–18 seconds longer than the permitted time. The pair studied the Olympic rules and discovered that the routine was timed from the moment their skates made contact with the ice. So, in order to be able to use their four-and-a-half minute Boléro, they devised their performance such that they didn’t actually start skating until about 18 seconds into the piece. The judges clearly didn’t object; they scored twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9s, including a unanimous 6.0 for artistic interpretation.

For your listening pleasure, here’s Tomita’s version of Ravel’s Boléro:

And here’s Torvill and Dean’s gold-winning performance at the 1984 Winter Olympics: