The New Boléro

The Bolero To quote Wikipedia's article:

Bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana.[1] Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited for inventing the dance in 1780[2]. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar.

I'm sure I'm not the first to think this, but I always think Ravel's Boléro is so evocative (I hate that word, but can't think of a better one for this case). It's so simple, so elegant, yet so mechanical and complex at the same time. Some say this is his most famous work.  I'm curious as to how a piece like this ended up influencing guys like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, due to the blatant minimalistic characteristics it possesses. I've always loved Ravel's Boléro. I love how it builds intensity without letting you realize it's building intensity. I love the simplicity of the melody. I love thinking about how much control the players must have in order to keep the same time for 15 minutes, and yet only grow in dynamic just ever so slightly as each second goes by; you'll ruin the whole thing if you let yourself go, lose control, and just go to town even for one little tiny note... it must be so tempting at times.  And the cathartic end just gives this sort of balls-out, classical-music distortion fulfillment...  It's like all of this careful and beautiful work was done for 14 minutes, and then everyone just shouts through their instruments for the last minute.  Awesome. Today I've recently realized, however, that there are a few pieces by a few of my favorite bands that sorta fit a modernized mold as the Boléro:

• Mogwai's "New Paths To Helicon, Pt I"
• Mono's "Halcyon, Beautiful Days"
• Sigur Rós' "Olsen Olsen"

Now, they might not sound anything like the Boléro, but they each share the ideas of a simple, repetitive bass line, a simple counter-melody, a simple melody, and a slow build to an explosion of cathartic goodness; and they're all in a meter that could almost feel like a triple time. I realized at one point back in my electronica days that all of my songs seemed to try to emulate this formula--it was totally unintentional--but they didn't even approached the result that all of the pieces I talked about here do. Take a gander... "New Paths To The Helicon, Pt. I", Mogwai, Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003 "Halcyon (Beautiful Days), Mono, Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined "Olsen Olsen", Sigur Ros, Agaetis Byrjun This stuff harkens to both the minimalist and the romanticist in me, capturing two very opposite concepts and meshing them together in to something great. Even if these pieces aren't Boléro-esque, I like to think they are. And that makes me happy too.