Maurice Ravel called Bolero a 17-minute experiment with no music in it, then watched audiences lose their minds over it. This episode traces the paradox back to his childhood in Ciboure, where a Basque-Spanish mother filled the house with folk song and an engineer father, inventor of an early internal combustion engine and a circus attraction called the Whirlwind of Death, took him to watch factory machinery.

The hosts cover his two expulsions from the Paris Conservatoire, the five failed attempts at the Prix de Rome and the 1905 Ravel Affair that forced director Theodore Dubois to resign, his circle of self-styled hooligans Les Apaches, and the fraught relationship with Debussy. They follow his World War I service driving munitions trucks, the loss of his mother, his open letter refusing a wartime ban on German music, the 1928 North Americ ...