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 American tour fueled by Gauloises cigarettes, and the aphasia that left him hearing music he could no longer write down before his death in 1937.

• Technically flawless but deliberately hollow cantatas as a quiet protest against the jury
• Debussy as fog versus Ravel as a house of glass, and what modal harmonies add to the sound
• Orchestration as painting: why a low flute plus a muted trumpet makes a color neither has alone
• Turning down George Gershwin to protect his authentic American voice
• Why the hosts think Bolero hacked human biology, and what Ravel might make of AI-generated music