Boléro, M. 81

Ravel's fifteen-minute study in obsession is scored so that nothing changes except color and mass: a single snare pattern, unbroken from the first bar to the last, holds two melodies that repeat seventeen times without variation or development. The genius is orchestration as slow reveal — flute alone over pizzicato strings, then clarinet, bassoon in a strained upper register, oboe d'amore, the eerie voice of the E-flat clarinet, a celesta and horn combination that produces a timbre nobody had heard before. Each instrument stains the same tune a different shade. The dynamic climb is so gradual you don't notice you've been recruited into it until the brass arrives and the whole orchestra is shouting the melody it once whispered. At the final bars Ravel finally lets the harmony slip a semitone into E major and the thing collapses, deliberately, into noise. He called it a piece for orchestra without music, and said the only miracle was that anyone accepted it. Written in 1928 as a ballet for Ida Rubinstein, it became his most famous work against his wishes, and its mechanistic repetition has been read as everything from erotic to industrial to a premonition of the neurological illness that later took his ability to write. Play it uninterrupted, loud, in one sitting — it does not survive being sampled.