HISSES HAVE FOLLOWED THE RENDITION of much modern music, but joy would have warmed the heart of the Frenchman, Ravel, to hear the shouts and plaudits following Toscanini’s conducting of his “Bolero.” The composition is a year old, and was presented, two weeks ago, for the first time in New York. Carnegie Hall rocked; and music critics were rapt out of their megrims in describing the effect of this electric composition. The music depicts a Spanish dance, and in the analysis by Olin Downs of the New York Times, shows that “this master of modern musical speech builds his tonal structure over the simplest possible harmonic bass, and makes exactly one modulation from key, at the final climax.” Further:
The piece is in itself a school of orchestration. It is not great music, but the craft, the virtuosity, the racial understanding in it—Ravel was born, remember, in Ciboure—are really thrilling. It is no more nor less than a ‘jeu d’esprit’ by two masters— the one of the means of composition, the other of the interpreting orchestra. They held carnival together, and it was not astonishing that the audience shouted.”