Bolero Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Bolero - Essay Example Levitin and Wooten look at music how people perceive it within a large paradigm. Bolero is a movement musical piece that was pioneered by Maurice Ravel. It would later stand out as one of his most famous musical compositions of his time. As such, it is appropriate to use this piece to analyse these musical concepts (Levitin 78). The music features unique musical composition with a new style of composition and dance gestures, with the musical instrumentation largely utilizing a sopranino saxophone in F. Furthermore, this form of music has been characterized as having a plain structural composition being in C major of ? timing. In its composition, Bolero music starts with pianissimo progressing in a crescendo and ending up to a fortissimo being played so loud. The music is anchored on a constant ostinato in the entire composition. Wooten’s â€Å"The Music Lesson† brings out a rich collection of concepts that he has come up with over the years in his Bass camps. A combinat ion of the ten ideas seeks to illustrate music as a language all interwoven into musical concepts. Quite distinctively, Wooten identifies these concepts as elements of music that he identifies as notes, articulation, feel, musical technique, rhythm, dynamics, tone, listening, phrasing, and space (Wooten 98). Similarly, Levitin’s â€Å"This is your brain on music† offers insightful information regarding how humans perceive musical sounds and the manner in which the human brain processes musical sounds. In his point of view, humans have been successful in their own standing due to music (Levitin 56). In using these concepts to analyze Bolero music, several issues come into the mind. These issues are related to how music is perceived and how humans interpret it. In a fundamental way, Ravel’s Bolero music takes fifteen minutes repeating each of the song themes’ two sections approximately nine times using the same key. The composition uses various orchestratio ns varying considerably the musical texture. Consequently, it creates crescendo. Using Wooten’s core concepts, Bolero puts into focus a repeat pattern of AA BB four times, and AB being repeated once. All these serve to offer the composition a sort of modulation that creates a cataclysmic musical closure. In putting Levitin’s perspective, the melody used in the compositions makes the music to stick in human brains because of simple rhythm use. The effects of most of the repetitive concepts of Wooten seek to make the musical patterns stick to people’s brain. Therefore, occasionally people can be able to feel the beats and sounds of a particular music without physically listening to it playing (Wooten 45-8). Much of Andre Rieu’s renditions were based on classical music creating a new niche in music from the period ending up to the twentieth century. His approach to classical music was mostly anchored on involving the audience during musical performances so t hat the audience can appreciate music. However, these renditions combined the admired compositions of great classical musicians of the time with rather informal musical performance environment that was mostly associated with pop music. His articulation of music provided a festive atmosphere for the audience where they are encouraged to participate in the performance through dance and song. Wooten would later describe this perception of music as more of a language of the learning process to understand music (Wooten 72). The way the audience