Maurice Ravel’s Bolero: A mystical dance hidden beneath a sensual ballet. An app roach to its symbolic meanings

Authors

  • Josep Maria Gregori i Cifré Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Keywords:

Maurice Ravel, Bolero, music and symbolism, music and number, mystical dance, body and music, 20th-century French music.

Abstract

Claudio Naranjo’s thesis that Ravel’s Bolero was inspired by a Sufi dance allows us to delve deeper into an interpretative reading of a symbolic message. The relationship between music and number throbs within the rhythmic, melodic, harmonic and timbre parameters of the work’s musical discourse. The reiterative return and resurgence of the melody from the pole of the tonic in Ravel’s Bolero forms the structure of a melodic cone, which ascends, coloured with new incoming frequencies, into a sonorous helicoidal spiral, leading to the luminous metamorphosis of a perfect and absolute realization at the end of this magnificent composition.

Keywords: Maurice Ravel, Bolero, music and symbolism, music and number, mystical dance, body and music, 20th-century French music.

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Author Biography

Josep Maria Gregori i Cifré, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona


 


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Issue

Vol. 14 (2021)

Section

Articles

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