Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

RAVEL'S DENOUEMENT

Tt's 1928 - look, it's my book, if I say it's 1928, it's 1928 - other-JLwise I'm taking my ball back - and Ravel is puzzling over a piece of music. He's just received a commission from a dancer for a piece of orchestral music, and it has made him reach for the scraps of manuscript he started some time back. They were all about one simple short tune, repeated over and over again. In the same key. He got them out and looked over them again. Could you really sustain an entire fifteen -minute-long piece with absolutely no 'development' of the tune, and staying in just one key? The answer? No, 'course you couldn't - OR THEN AGAIN, COULD YOU?

It would be the supreme test of a supreme orchestrator, because, to be fair, few other composers knew what sounds an orchestra could and couldn't make the way Ravel did. And furthermore, he proved it in 1928, with his Bolero.

OK, so it does go into another key, just a little way from the end, but to brilliant effect, it's got to be said. Nowadays, of course, some say it is tarnished, somehow, by associations with Torvill and Dean. Well, to that 'some', I say 'TOSH and POPPYCOCK!' It's still the