aiming at achieving anything different from, or anything more than, it actually does achieve. Before its first performance, I issued a warning to the effect that what I had written was a piece lasting seventeen minutes and consisting wholly of "orchestral tissue without music"—of one very long, gradual crescendo. There are no contrasts, and practically no invention except the plan and the manner of execution. In 1934, in his book Music Ho!, Constant Lambert wrote: "There is a definite limit to the length of time a composer can go on writing in one dance rhythm (this limit is obviously reached by Ravel towards the end of La valse and towards the beginning of Boléro)." Literary critic Allan Bloom commented in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, "Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them." In a 2011 article for The Cambridge Quarterly, Michael Lanford wrote, "throughout his life, Maurice Ravel was captivated by the act of creation outlined in Edgar Allan Poe's Philosophy of Composition." Since, in his words, Boléro defies "traditional methods of musical analysis owing to its melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic repetitiveness," he offers an analysis that "corresponds to Ravel's documented reflections on the creative process and the aesthetic precepts outlined in Poe's Philosophy of Composition." Lanford also contends that Boléro was quite possibly a deeply personal work for Ravel. As evidence, Lanford cites Ravel's admissions that the rhythms of Boléro were inspired by the machines of his father's factory and melodic materials came from a berceuse Ravel's mother sang to him at nighttime. Lanford also proposes that Boléro is imbued with tragedy, observing that the snare drum "dehumanizes one of the most sensuously connotative aspects of the bolero", "instruments with the capacity for melodic expression mimic the machinery," and the melody consistently ends with a descending tetrachord. In popular culture The piece gained new attention after it was prominently featured in the 1979 romantic comedy 10, costarring Dudley Moore and Bo Derek. This resulted in massive sales, generated an estimated $1 million in royalties and briefly made Ravel the best-selling classical composer 40 years after his death. The ice dancing pair Torvill and Dean danced to a six-minute version of the work in winning the gold medal in ice dancing at