Program Notes: Ravel Boléro

MAURICE RAVEL 
Rapsodie espagnole 
BORN: March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, France 
DIED: December 28, 1937, in Paris, France 
WORK COMPOSED: 1907–1908 
WORLD PREMIERE: March 15, 1908, in Paris, France, by the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne conducted by Édouard Colonne. 

What to Listen For: 

• The opening notes of the first movement, Prélude à la nuit, are littered throughout this nearly 15-minute work. 

The opening notes of the first movement, Prélude à la nuit, are littered throughout this nearly 15-minute work. 

Although Maurice Ravel spent the first 21 years of his life in Paris, the composer’s affinity for the music and culture of Spain can be traced to his Basque mother and his birthplace, Ciboure, about 10 miles northeast of the Spanish border. Ravel returned often to his birthplace and its distinct Basque culture to visit family, retreat from city life and compose.  

The Rapsodie espagnole opens with a gliding four-note figure whose floating pulses and languorous throbs seem to emanate from an unseen distance. As befitting a nocturnal prelude, the Prélude à la nuit veers from swooning by the orchestra to luminous writing for the wind instruments, especially in the clarinets and bassoons.  

A slinky string ostinato propels the Malagueña into a festive atmosphere, though it is soon tempered by cascading, calliope-like scales and, supported by groaning divisi (“divided”) violas and cellos, an incantatory melody on the English horn. The opening four notes of the Prélude à la nuit reappear before a rising melodic fragment flickers and vanishes, ending the movement. 

Ravel captioned the Habanera, written in 1895 as one of the Sites auriculaires for piano duo, with a quote from poet Charles Baudelaire, “Au pays parfumé que le soleil caresse ...” (“In the fragrant land that the sun caresses ...”). Sighing strings and later, a clattering tambourine help paint an exotic portrait of mystery and longing.  

The concluding Feria justifies Igor Stravinsky’s observation that composers of his generation regarded the Rapsodie espagnole “as the dernier cri (‘the last word’) in harmonic subtlety and orchestral brilliance.” Ravel expands a pirouetting melody by the piccolos, harp and hushed tremolo violins into a grand procession. The opening of the Prélude reappears in various guises: morose, aggressive and in the finale, joyous. 

GUNTHER SCHULLER 
Symphony for Brass and Percussion, Op. 16 
BORN: November 22, 1925, in New York, New York 
DIED: June 21, 2015, in Boston, Massachusetts 
WORK COMPOSED: 1949–1950 
WORLD PREMIERE: April 1, 1951, in New York, New York, at an International Society for Contemporary Music concert conducted by Leon Barzin. 

What to Listen For: 

• Schuller’s keen understanding of brass instruments and their capabilities are revealed in four movements, which are meant to represent different aspects of brass characteristics, with the uniting factor the increase in intensity and technical challenge for its performers. 

Schuller’s keen understanding of brass instruments and their capabilities are revealed in four movements, which are meant to represent different aspects of brass characteristics, with the uniting factor the increase in intensity and technical challenge for its performers. 

Gunther Schuller was a musical prodigy and polymath. At the age of 17, he auditioned for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and impressed conductor Eugene Goosens, who awarded Schuller — a high school dropout — the position of principal horn. At the age of 20, Schuller returned to his native New York and joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Once home he realized, “my first calling was that of a composer.” 

The ever-curious Schuller immersed himself in the jazz scene, which marked him as an anomaly among his fellow orchestra musicians. While frequenting clubs such as the Royal Roost (informally known as the “Metropolitan Bopera House”) late into the evening, he began meeting and collaborating with musicians and composers. In early 1950, Schuller brought his buttery tone and agile phrasing to a recording session led by Miles Davis for what became a landmark LP, Birth of the Cool. By then, Schuller had completed “my modern classical nonjazz atonal Symphony for Brass and Percussion.” 

Transcending what Schuller bemoaned as “the stereotypes of expression” associated with brass instruments, each movement of the Symphony presents a complex interplay of trumpets, trombones and horns along with a baritone horn and, unusually, two tubas. 

The opening chord contains 10 of the chromatic scale’s 12 notes and challenges the players to not only blend but do so in tune. A stark and brooding Andante yields to a loping Vivace, described by the composer as “a scherzo with passages requiring great agility and technical dexterity.” Six muted trumpets guide the Lento desolato, an aching chorale of desolation and mourning. Schuller’s vast understanding of the brass shines in the Allegro: Scurrying sixteenth notes richochet from one instrument to another in a fleet-footed perpetuum mobile rushing towards a thrilling climax. 

MAURICE RAVEL 
Sites auriculaires (orchestration by Kenneth Hesketh in 2024) 
WORK COMPOSED: 1895, 1897 
WORLD PREMIERE: January 11, 2025, in Manchester, England, by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. 

What to Listen For: 

• This new orchestration of a work originally written for two pianos amplifies Ravel's skill in orchestral color and texture. 

This new orchestration of a work originally written for two pianos amplifies Ravel's skill in orchestral color and texture. 

Translated idiomatically as “places for those who listen with their own ears,” Sites auriculaires was written by Ravel for piano duo. Unlike the more popular format of the piano duet (also known as “piano four hands” where two pianists share a piano), composing for two pianos allows for greater volume and reach across the keyboard. The 1898 premiere featured a uniquely pianistic oddity: two pianos conjoined into a single mammoth instrument.  

The performance was riddled with mistakes, and critics hated the music. Ravel retracted the work. Decades later he wrote, “I do not desire a second performance, after 30 years, of my Sites auriculaires.” Yet Ravel liked the music enough to revise and orchestrate the Habanera for the Rapsodie espagnole.  

As part of the worldwide celebration of Ravel’s 150th anniversary, Maestro Ludovic Morlot — also the Seattle Symphony's Judith Fong Conductor Emeritus — asked composer Kenneth Hesketh to orchestrate Sites auriculaires for the BBC Philharmonic. In a recent interview, Hesketh admitted to being “absolutely intimidated” by the project. Rather than mimic Ravel’s scoring of the Habanera, Hesketh sometimes employs what he calls “a type of gentle oppositional or negative orchestration” which, for example, might entail assigning certain parts to woodwinds where Ravel used strings. 

Ravel never orchestrated the second half of Sites, the enchanting Entre cloches (“Among Bells”). Written in 1897 in the unusual meter of 10/8, tolling groups of three, three, two and two beats as well as steadier phrases of three, three and four beats conjure the cross-rhythms of pealing bells from scattered church belfries. Hesketh augments Ravel’s clanging soundscape by adding glimmers of acoustic reflections from various instruments in the orchestra, all of which gradually recede into silence. 

ALLISON LOGGINS-HULL 
Rhapsody on a Theme by Joni for Solo Flute and Orchestra 
BORN: November 27, 1982, in Chicago, Illinois 
WORK COMPOSED: 2024 
WEST COAST PREMIERE: June 19, 2025, in Seattle, Washington, by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot. 

What to Listen For: 

• The cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the flutist’s skill, daring and finesse — appears in the middle of the Rhapsody. 

The cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the flutist’s skill, daring and finesse — appears in the middle of the Rhapsody. 

Joni refers to Joni Mitchell, the Canadian singer-songwriter beloved for her eclectic and pathbreaking albums, including Blue (1971), Court and Spark (1974) and Mingus (1979). Songs such as “Both Sides Now,” “Help Me” and “Big Yellow Taxi” cemented her reputation for poetic imagery and enduring emotional resonance. 

In her preface to the score of Rhapsody on a Theme by Joni, Allison Loggins-Hull states that Mitchell’s music “has been a lifeline and profound influence on me.” Initially conceived for flutist Alex Sopp and co-commissioned by Seattle Symphony, Rhapsody also commemorates the centennial of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Inspired by Mitchell and Sopp, the composer honors the tradition and repertory of the instrument “while also leaning into modern and popular musical language, as Gershwin does in his Rhapsody in Blue.” 

Against a backdrop of trilling oboes and clarinets, jaunty strings announce a theme sounded by the horn — a plaintive allusion to “My Old Man” from Blue. Brash, exuberant exchanges between the strings and woodwinds at once evoke a hoe-down, the blues and funk due to continual metric shifts in groups of four, three, two and three beats. A florid flute solo ushers in a series of variations, each distinguished by a change in mood and instrumentation. Indicated in the score as “Majestic,” ascending flourishes heard in upper winds and strings punctuate a yearning chorale; pulsing double basses and bassoons drive the “Playfully Cheeky” sections while a shaking tambourine marks the switch to “Abruptly Serious.” 

After a songlike reverie led by the soloist, the violas and clarinets reprise part of the “My Old Man” theme. A brief pause signals the cadenza. The composer — herself a virtuosa flutist and one-half of the innovative duo Flutronix — places tremendous demands on the soloist, who must create whispering, at times ghostly, timbres amidst darting passages that twirl and sing. Then, the orchestra quietly rejoins the music for several more episodes. A final nod to “My Old Man” eases the Rhapsody into a placid, radiant ending. 

MAURICE RAVEL 
Boléro 
WORK COMPOSED: 1928 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 22, 1928, in Paris, France, with the orchestra of the Paris Opéra conducted by Walther Straram. 

What to Listen For: 

• Boléro is rooted in distinct ostinati — repeated rhythmic and melodic patterns — played by the snare drum, pizzicato (“plucked”) strings and melodies passed among the instruments of the orchestra. 

Boléro is rooted in distinct ostinati — repeated rhythmic and melodic patterns — played by the snare drum, pizzicato (“plucked”) strings and melodies passed among the instruments of the orchestra. 

With mordant, self-effacing wit, Maurice Ravel once confessed, “I’ve written only one masterpiece: Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it.”  

Originally titled Fandango, Boléro began as a frustrating misadventure. Returning home from a succesful tour of the United States, Ravel had expected to dash off a commission from Ida Rubinstein. A dancer who formed her own company after a stint in Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, Rubinstein had asked Ravel to orchestrate pieces from Iberia by Isaac Albéniz. But Ravel flew into a rage when he discovered that this comparatively easy task had been completed already by another composer for another dancer.  

Undeterred, Ravel embarked on what became his most popular work, creating what he called “orchestral tissue without music — of one long, very gradual crescendo.” Boléro has deceptively minimal elements: a drum tattoo, pizzicato strings (and later, harp) and folk melodies Ravel dismissed as “the usual Spanish-Arabian kind.” Gunther Schuller, an ardent admirer and occasional conductor of Ravel, believed Boléro was “heavily filtered through American jazz and the Parisian music hall.” 

The “orchestral tissue” builds a pastoral atmosphere through a succession of solos beginning with flute, clarinet and the pining of a bassoon in its upper register, followed by a piercing E-flat clarinet and seldom heard oboe d’amore. Boléro carries its wistful melody into flute and muted trumpet and continues a parade of unexpected sounds with three members of the saxophone family: tenor, sopranino and soprano. 

Ravel groups musicians in inventive ways, such as combining two piccolos with horn and celesta, while adding and subtracting instruments to reinforce the snare drum or strings. Suggesting a giant guitar, Ravel divides the second violins and violas into plucking two notes at once or strumming triplets (three notes played in the time of two). Orchestral textures in Boléro accumulate ceaselessly until one of the most electrifying endings in all of music: a triumphant elevation to E-major and a sudden, tumbling return to the home key of C-major. 

Christopher DeLaurenti © 2025 

Christopher DeLaurenti researches orchestral music, jazz, soundscape composition and computer music. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London. Christopher has taught ongoing courses at the Peabody Institute, Cornish College of the Arts and The College of William & Mary.