Boléro is a piece for orchestra that does one thing for about 15 minutes: it gets louder. One drum taps the same rhythm from the first second to the last. Two tunes take turns. A new instrument plays each time. Maurice Ravel wrote it in 1928, and it became his most famous piece.
Quick facts
- Composer: Maurice Ravel, a French composer who lived from 1875 to 1937
- Written: 1928, for a dancer named Ida Rubinstein
- Length: about 15 minutes
- Played by: a large orchestra, with saxophones
- The name: a bolero is a Spanish dance with three beats in a bar
How it works
Boléro is built from three things.
- The rhythm. A snare drum plays a pattern two bars long. It repeats that pattern without a break until the end, more than 160 times.
- Two tunes. The first is smooth and sunny. The second is darker and bends in odd places. Each one is played twice, then the other.
- One long crescendo. A crescendo means getting louder. The piece starts as soft as an orchestra can play and ends as loud as it can.
Nothing else changes. The speed stays the same. The key stays the same until the last half minute.
The order of the soloists
The tune passes from one instrument to the next. A child can treat the first half as a guessing game.
| Turn | Who plays the tune |
|---|---|
| 1 | Flute |
| 2 | Clarinet |
| 3 | Bassoon, high in its range |
| 4 | Small clarinet |
| 5 | Oboe d’amore, a deeper cousin of the oboe |
| 6 | Flute and a muted trumpet together |
| 7 | Tenor saxophone |
| 8 | A higher saxophone |
| 9 | Piccolos, a horn, and a celesta together |
| 10 | Oboes and clarinets |
| 11 | Trombone, sliding into its notes |
After that, groups play the tune: first the woodwinds, then the violins, then nearly everyone.
On turn 9, Ravel plays a trick. The piccolos play the same tune as the horn, but in different keys. The mix sounds like a strange organ.
The surprise at the end
For almost the whole piece, the music sits in one key. Then, half a minute before the end, the whole orchestra lurches up to a new key. It feels like a floor that tips. A few bars later it falls back, the trombones slide and roar, and the piece crashes to a stop.
What Ravel thought of it
Ravel called Boléro an experiment. He said it was a piece for orchestra “without music,” by which he meant that he had left out everything a composer does to develop a tune. He was surprised that orchestras wanted to play it.
A story from the first night says that a woman in the audience shouted that Ravel was mad. He is said to have answered that she had understood the piece.
Read Ravel for kids.
The hardest job in the orchestra
The snare drummer starts alone, as soft as a whisper, and plays the same pattern for a quarter of an hour without a slip. In some performances the drummer sits in the middle of the orchestra, where every player can hear the beat.
Things to do together
- Tap the drum part. Learn the pattern on a table with two fingers. Try to keep it going for one full minute.
- Guess the instrument. Pause before each new turn and guess who is next. Use the instrument families listening chart.
- Grow with the music. Start curled up on the floor. Rise a little with each turn, and be on tiptoe with arms up at the end.
- Draw the crescendo. Draw a line that starts thin on the left and gets thicker to the right. Mark the surprise near the end.
- Count the turns. Make a tally mark each time a tune starts again.
Questions to ask
- If the tune never changes, why is the piece not boring?
- Which solo was your favorite?
- How did the surprise near the end feel?
Where children may have heard it
Ice skaters and ice dancers love Boléro. The British pair Torvill and Dean won Olympic gold with it in 1984.
Words to know
- Crescendo: getting louder a little at a time
- Ostinato: a short pattern that repeats over and over
- Snare drum: a small drum with wires under it that rattle
Print and play
For the saxophones, read the saxophone for kids. Read woodwind instruments for kids and percussion instruments for kids to learn the soloists. For loud and soft in music, read dynamics explained for kids. More guides are listed in classical music listening guides for kids.
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This article is part of Classical music listening guides for kids: famous pieces, one at a time.
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Use it with your kids
Print a listening page, a practice chart, or a composer fact sheet. Or try a tool, such as the composer timeline or the piece picker.