Obsessive repetition

Ravel's Boléro may be the composer's single most popular work, but there's a lot more to it than its two beguiling melodies may suggest, says Tom Service

- Tom Service

There's nothing like Ravel's Boléro: just two tunes, repeated throughout the orchestra, over and over again. It's a 15-minute piece 'without music in it', as Ravel himself said. There's no thematic development in Boléro, none of the conventional ways of making and sustaining a piece of orchestral music, even in the experimental decade of the 1920s.