Orchestral Tissue, Subordinate Arabesques, and Turning Inward in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro

Abstract

In response to Maurice Ravel’s puzzling description of Boléro as “orchestral tissue without music,” this article explores how he privileges timbre over techniques traditionally associated with musical development. Even as I acknowledge longstanding perceptions of Boléro as a piece that is characterized by monotony and repetition, I show how Ravel relies on alternating decorative and arabesque melodies to highlight a parallel process of timbral variation. The role played by inward-turning subordinate arabesques is especially expressive given how they establish a timbrally competitive relationship with decorative themes, which escalates towards a moment of melodic disruption and formal collapse. Stylistic connections between Boléro and other contemporaneous works and idioms raise the question of whether, in the absence of music, timbral diversity allows Boléro to function as the orchestration treatise that Ravel failed to complete.