Concepts of Wooten and Levitin in Two Versions of Bolero - Essay Example

Levitin and Wooten look at music how people perceive it within a large paradigm. Bolero is a moving musical piece that was pioneered by Maurice Ravel. It would later stand out as one of the most famous musical compositions of his time. As such, it is appropriate to use this piece to analyze 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 ¾ timing. In its composition, Bolero music starts with pianissimo progressing in a crescendo and ending up with a fortissimo being played so loud. The music is anchored on a constant ostinato in the entire composition.  Wooten’s “The Music Lesson” brings out a rich collection of concepts that he has come up with over the years in his Bass camps. A combination 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 the musical technique, rhythm, dynamics, tone, listening, phrasing, and space (Wooten, 98). Similarly, Levitin’s “This is your brain on music” offers insightful information regarding how humans perceive musical sounds and how the human brain processes musical sounds. In his point of view, humans have been successful in their standing due to music (Levitin, 56).

In using these concepts to analyze Bolero music, several issues come into mind. These issues are related to how music is perceived and how humans interpret it. Fundamentally, 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 orchestrations varying considerably the musical texture. Consequently, it creates a 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 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 brains. Therefore, occasionally people can be able to feel the beats and sounds of 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 that the audience can appreciate music. However, these renditions combined the admired compositions of great classical musicians of the time with a 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 was introduced to music during Rieu’s performance is quite similar to introducing a child to language. Thus, music becomes a form of expression, where people join through dance and song to convey their heart most felt feelings to the song being performed. People learn music and it gets into their brains and when treated as a language, Wooten argues, then people can learn new things and skills.

In conclusion, it is evident that Wooten and Levitin’s concepts of dynamics, rhythm/tempo, phrasing, and tone color in Bolero are not only used in understanding music in totality, but they progressively come out clearly as concepts that can be utilized in the articulation of human’s perceptions of various musical sounds. Their work generally leads up to the generalization of musical perception as intimate build-up processes operating as a whole rather than individual components. When people hear music in terms of tonal framework, they can relate the tones within the broader framework of beats. The integration of these concepts in Bolero makes the music lively and attractive to the listeners (Wooten, 67-9). Besides, the rhythm, tone color, and even the use of dynamics in the music make it possess the ability to stick to the minds of the audience. No wonder this was one of the excellent compositions of Ravel.