My piece takes its title from Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, which incidentally appears in the 2008 Proms alongside a performance of the Bolero.
In piecing together fragments of both works I discovered that musically they are astonishingly compatible, and that it was in fact quite possible to weave together their entire main themes to create a new Pavane altogether, based here not on a dead princess but on the fictional death of the boléro dance itself. Since its composition in 1928, Ravel’s Bolero has frequently been the subject of much debate, and whilst some hail it as a masterpiece, others are vehemently against its repetitive and perhaps monotonous qualities and care not to ever hear it again. At seventeen minutes in length, it was undeniably a tour de force in simplistic writing, repeating the same melody with no variant in speed or invention – ‘orchestral tissue without music’ as the composer himself said in warning the audience before the première. For a work whose royalties had earned over £40million by the dawn of the new millennium, its popularity in the concert hall or on soundtrack cannot be questioned. But for those who took the eighteen repetitions of the melody (apparently amounting to 4037 drum beats) as evidence that the composer was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease were perhaps unaware that later in the twentieth-century the idea of endlessly repeating patterns and rhythms would become an established and respected musical form – minimalism.
In writing for the piano I have crucially stripped the Bolero of perhaps its only variant, that of orchestral colour. The piano is as much a percussion instrument as a keyboard instrument, and I have exploited this not only in requests for rhythmic precision but in actual physical tapping of the piano in echoing the incessant rhythm of Ravel’s drum. The Bolero’s main melody is combined with the harmonic and rhythmic structure of Ravel’s Pavane, at first hinting but eventually in full, heard simultaneously. This makes way to a final dialogue of non-pitched sounds between the four hands. Where Ravel’s Bolero is one colossal crescendo, my Pavane works in reverse and dissipates to nothing. The combined melodies gradually disappear as the sustained sound dies away, leaving only the fading rhythmic motif. All is not lost, however. As the boléro breathes its last few sighs a hint at the direction of twentieth-century’s musicological path is given in the counter-rhythm of the primo part: a quotation of Steve Reich’s iconic Clapping Music (1972