Bolero

The Ultimate Sex and Seduction Song. It's a symphonic piece written by Maurice Ravel, a bona fide French guy. It was pretty controversial for a while, simply because it's so OBVIOUSLY a sex song.

It has the rhythm down pat; it starts slow and steady and builds on the same addictive theme all the way to a crashing climax, and then has the gall to even do the post-orgasm thrusts at the end.

The best part about the Bolero is not its appeal to those of us with a yen for classical music. The BEST part is what it can do for you in your efforts to seduce someone who may, perhaps, not immediately recognize what the song is obviously for.

Hint, hint.

Have fun!

A number of people have recorded their interpretations of Bolero:

• Frank Zappa - very zappa-ish. Great!
• Dana Dragomir - pan flute (in my opinion not very interesting)
• Mojo Club - quite a groovy piece...
• Meat Loaf - Tiefling told me it's on the re-mastered Bat out of Hell album.
• I've also heard a random piano-only version

Ravel's original longer-than-thirteen-minutes masterpiece is however still the best one for all your seduction needs.

An interesting orchestral work by composer Maurice Ravel. Ravel, a Frenchman, wrote this well known, Spanish influenced piece in 1928.

A basic melody (and variations on this melody) is repeated nearly 20 times during the course of the work. At first, many of the wind instruments take turns playing the melody solo. Eventually, the melody is played by ever growing groups of instruments, until, finally, the whole orchestra plays it together in a massive crescendo.

Throughout the entire piece, which is well in excess of 15 minutes long, a lone snare drum plays a single basic, repeating rhythm over and over, non-stop.

When Bolero is performed in concert, if the conductor is the sort to interact with the audience, the snare drummer's plight often leads to a cheesy joke of one sort or another, usually indicating that the snare drummer will be, at the conclusion of the piece, removed on a stretcher from exhaustion.

One piece of interesting trivia is that Ravel's Bolero has the undisputed worst cello part in the history of orchestral music. Not only is it mind-numbingly monotonous, it's entirely pizzicatto. I don't think Ravel had figured out that cellos are NOT guitars and are NOT meant to be strummed across all four strings for ten minutes. Or that cellists doing pizzicatto don't have the benefit of any small handy inanimate object to pluck the strings with, as guitarists do. We use our bare thumbs. By the end of the first read, one guy's thumb had blistered right open and was bleeding all over his century-old German masterpiece of a cello.

It's alleged to be orgasmic. If orgasms were really this boring, I'd take up quilt-making instead. Fortunately the alleged sexual connotations were not obvious us when we played it, so we escaped permanently associating eroticism with shrill clarinets whining on and on and on, and tired and blistered hands.

Needless to say, anyone trying to seduce this jaded musician with Ravel would meet a swift and violent response.

Bo*le"ro (&?;), n. [Sp.] (Mus.)

A Spanish dance, or the lively music which accompanies it.

 

© Webster 1913

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Bo*le"ro (?), n.

A kind of small outer jacket, with or without sleeves, worn by women.

 

© Webster 1913