tag:williambolcom.com,2005:/blogs/in-the-media?p=2
In the Media
2024-03-09T12:08:47-06:00
William Bolcom
false
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/7364402
2024-03-09T12:08:47-06:00
2024-03-09T12:08:48-06:00
Long Lost Loves (and Grey Suede Gloves)
<p><span style="color:#070B1D;"><i>Musica Viva Australia Presents: A captivating tapestry of William Bolcom’s cabaret songs, Delving into life’s complexities and the playful dance of comedy and love</i></span></p><!-- more --><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/s:bzglfiles/u/188311/56a5340f339d354f510e640dfe108af16e51295b/original/michael-curtin-and-anna-dowsley-photo-by-charlie-hardie.jpg/!!/meta:eyJzcmNCdWNrZXQiOiJiemdsZmlsZXMifQ==" class="size_l justify_center border_" height="381" width="678" /><p><span style="color:#070B1D;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style="color:#070B1D;">Constantine Costi uncovers the emotional layers using humour and musical storytelling in Long Lost Loves (and Grey Suede Gloves); a one-woman show he wrote and directed, set to tour nationwide this February and March.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style="color:#070B1D;">Presented by Musica Viva Australia and featuring mezzo-soprano Anna Dowsley and Australia’s acclaimed pianist Michael Curtain, the production weaves together William Bolcom’s cabaret songs.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><span style="color:#070B1D;">The collection of “scattered stories about love and loss” aims to explore life’s complexities, the nuances of love, and the significance of living in the present moment.</span></p><p><a class="no-pjax" href="https://neoskosmos.com/en/2024/02/18/life/stage/constantine-costis-musical-comedy-a-heartfelt-journey-through-long-lost-loves-and-grey-suede-gloves/" target="_blank" data-link-type="url"><span style="color:#070B1D;">Read the full story</span> (neokosmos.com)</a></p><p><span style="color:#070B1D;"><strong>The production ran in 2024 in these Australian venues:</strong></span></p><p><span style="color:#070B1D;">Newcastle 20 February 7:30pm</span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Brisbane, Powerhouse 22 February 7pm</span></span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Canberra, Playhouse 1 March 7pm</span></span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Sydney 4 March 7pm</span></span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Melbourne 5 March 7pm</span></span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Adelaide 7 March 7:30pm</span></span><br><span style="color:#070B1D;"><span>Perth 10 March 6:30pm</span></span></p><p><a class="no-pjax" href="https://artsreview.com.au/long-lost-loves-and-grey-suede-gloves/" target="_blank" data-link-type="url">Read the ArtsReview.com.au review</a>:</p><p style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:black;">“<i>Long Lost Loves</i> (<i>and Grey Suede Gloves</i>) contains twenty Bolcom songs. The longest, <i>Oh Close the Curtain</i>, runs about five minutes, while there are several, including <i>Surprise!</i>, <i>Lady Luck</i> and <i>Satisfaction</i> (sorry Mick, Bolcom got there first!) take only around one minute each to perform.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="text-align:center;"><span style="color:black;">Of the twenty songs, perhaps the two most popular, <i>Song of Black Max</i>, and the exquisite <i>Waitin</i> are offered as encores, while the rest, including <i>Toothbrush Time</i>, <i>At the Last Lousy Moments of Love</i>, and <i>Amor</i> are shoe-horned into a concocted narrative around a group of friends attending the wake for a character named George, then expressing their recollections of George through Bolcom’s songs.”<o:p></o:p></span></p><p><o:p></o:p><span style="color:#070B1D;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/7052935
2022-09-04T10:05:08-05:00
2023-10-16T09:49:24-05:00
"William Bolcom: Musical Influences and Colleagues" - The Syncopated Times
<p>Artist Profile and Interview by Matthew de Lacey Davidson, October 31, 2021 </p><!-- more -->
<p>Dr. William Bolcom celebrated his 83rd birthday this year. Few musicians can compare with the diversity of his abilities. He has studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen. He also became an admirable pianist, recording music which had been heretofore neglected—both as a soloist, and as accompanist to his wife, singer Joan Morris, with whom he shares an abiding interest in American popular song of the late 19th century to the late 1920s. He even studied poetry writing with Theodore Roehthke. And he was the first Pulitzer-prize winning composer to win for a piano work instead of an orchestral, or so-called “large-scale” work.</p>
<p>While his musical activities may be diminishing, in the following conversation, I found both him and Ms. Morris (with whom I spoke a little), to be delightful, engaging, and witty. The purpose of this interview was to attempt to delve a little into Dr. Bolcom’s musical and personal relationships in the arena of ragtime.</p>
<p><em><strong>Matthew de Lacey Davidson:</strong> In what specific compositional ways did Alban Berg’s music influence you? Did he influence your piano music? </em></p>
<p><strong>William Bolcom: </strong>I remember a major early experience—I was 11 years old and heard the Julliard Quartet play Berg’s Lyric Suite. They were touring in the 1950s, and I listened to them [live while I was sitting] in the balcony [of a concert hall]. As I heard it, I followed the score at the same time and I was absolutely entranced. I felt that he [Berg] had created an expanded complex tonality with strict tonal references, wherein the ear is attracted to certain tones. I also played his one movement [piano] sonata. It’s a beautiful piece.</p>
<p><a contents="Read the full interview at syncopatedtimes.com" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://syncopatedtimes.com/william-bolcom-musical-influences-and-colleagues/" target="_blank">Read the full interview at syncopatedtimes.com</a>. </p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/5614217
2019-01-26T16:53:05-06:00
2019-01-26T16:53:05-06:00
William Bolcom's Dinner at Eight served up at Wexford Festival Opera
<p>Critics from around the world came to Ireland to weigh in on the opera's European Premiere in October</p><!-- more -->
<p><strong><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/2417fc948c0876388b1732f45bcf7181d9e7c327/original/screenshot-2019-01-14-20-35-50.png/!!/undefined/b:W1sic2l6ZSIsIm1lZGl1bSJdXQ==.png" class="size_m justify_left border_" />William Bolcom's <em>Dinner at Eight</em> served up at Wexford Festival Opera</strong><br>"Musically, the work blurs the lines between opera and musical theatre; we hear jazz in the score, and more than an echo of Thomas Adès, especially in the vocal lines of the recitatives. ... Bolcom's score is cinematic to a very high degree, both in the sense that it recalls old movies scores and that it underlines the action with very descriptive passages." -- Pia Maltri, <strong><a contents="bachtrack.com" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://bachtrack.com/review-dinner-eight-bolcom-agler-dunleavy-wexford-festival-opera-october-2018" style="" target="_blank">bachtrack.com</a></strong>, October 22, 2018 </p>
<p><strong>The party has to go on </strong><br>"Bolcom's music is a colorful mix of tunes between jazz, Broadway show and Gershwin echoes that, with small atonal interruptions, reveal the cracks behind the facade in society. Bolcom finds a suitable musical characterization for every single figure. Millicent's tone is met very well, for example, which, in addition to the light-sounding theme of<em> Dinner at Eight</em>, presents a socially required and friendly non-obligation in a light waltz rhythm." --Thomas Molke, <strong><a contents="Online Musik Magazin" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.omm.de/veranstaltungen/festspiele2018/WEXFORD-2018-dinner-at-eight.html" style="" target="_blank">Online Musik Magazin</a></strong> (translated from the German) </p>
<p><strong>William Bolcom's "Dinner at Eight" skillfully mimics Hollywood nostalgia </strong><br>"You have to rely on nostalgia, roaring twenties, jazz brooms, art deco and good jokes to help this slightly yellowed character comedy on the dramatic jumps. Bolcom and his librettist Mark Campbell have succeeded, giving the impression, with a lot of tonal camouflage and literary quotation, that Stephen Sondheim wrote a Cole-Porter-musical and Fred Astaire is dancing around the corner." -- Manuel Brug, October 23, 2018, <strong><a contents="www.welt.de/" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://klassiker.welt.de/2018/10/23/zweite-festival-premiere-in-wexford-william-bolcoms-dinner-at-eight-imitiert-gekonnt-hollywood-nostalgie/" style="" target="_blank">www.welt.de/</a></strong> (translated from the German)</p>
<p><strong>"Production values at Wexford are always high,</strong> and this pays terrific dividends in Bolcom’s stylish comedy <em>Dinner at Eight,</em> set in Depression-era New York and based on a George S Kaufman and Edna Ferber Broadway play of 1932. Here too, sets and costumes are full of style and conviction. And operas about dinner parties – Bolcom is following Hindemith and Lennox Berkeley along this seam – have the built-in advantage that they invariably involve a rich mix of contrasted characters, domestic dramas, farcical possibilities and ensemble opportunities.... Bolcom’s music, efficient and light in touch, is matched by a high-quality libretto by Mark Campbell in which every word is clear." -- Martin Kettle, <strong><a contents="The Guardian" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/oct/30/wexford-opera-festival-2018-leoni-giordano-mercadante-bolcom" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>,</strong> October 30, 2018 </p>
<p><strong>"Composer William Bolcom joined the curtain calls </strong>for his piece <em>Dinner at Eight,</em> an entertaining musical version of a depression era play in which preparations for a high-society dinner party go awry. The sumptuous art deco sets framed in a 3-D skyline were a visual feast. Costumes recalled the glamour of the 1930s. Irish singers Sharon Carty and Maria Hughs joined the American cast. The orchestration with prominent reeds and saxophone underscored the big band mood evoked by the Festival Orchestra under David Agler in his penultimate season as artistic director." -- Cathy Desmond, <a contents="Irish Examiner," data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/lifestyle/culture/review-wexford-festival-opera-878617.html"><strong>Irish Examiner,</strong></a> October 23, 2018 </p>
<p><strong>"Bolcom's music is readily accepted by the public,</strong> and his songs give their interpreters the opportunity to shine. With a great libretto, the resulting opera is truly appealing to all." -- José M. Irurzun, <strong><a contents="Opera World" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://www.operaworld.es/dinner-at-eight-de-bolcom-un-buen-espectaculo-en-wexford/">Opera World</a>,</strong> October 31, 2018 (translated from the Spanish) </p>
<p><strong>"Bolcom’s score is a skillful medley of varied pastiches, </strong>played by a Broadway-tinted band that can swell with symphonic sumptuousness in-between-scenes, and withdraw to sensitively support the aria-numbers allotted to each of the struggling protagonists". -- Claire Seymour, <strong><a contents="Opera Today" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.operatoday.com/content/2018/10/wexford_festiva.php" style="" target="_blank">Opera Today</a></strong>, October 24, 2018 </p>
<p><strong>"A light-hearted work, with a dark underside,</strong> very entertaining and wonderfully presented." -- Alan Neilson, <a contents="estival Diary: Wexford Festival Opera 2018, Day 2&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://operawire.com/festival-diary-wexford-festival-opera-2018-day-2/" style="" target="_blank"><strong>Festival Diary: Wexford Festival Opera 2018, Day 2</strong></a></p>
<p><strong>"Bolcom uses an eclectic range of styles </strong>in his score, including Broadway musical numbers, jazz, blues and modernist vocal lines. The work is essentially a hybrid, part Broadway musical and part opera. As the opera progresses, Bolcom gives all the main characters arias which are tightly constructed.... The performers did an excellent job throughout and I was particularly impressed with the clarity of the diction and the shaping and phrasing of Bolcom’s vocal lines. The standout performance of the evening was Mary Dunleavy in the role of Millicent Jordan. Her vocal lines were delivered with power and dynamism and the scene at the end of Act I where she complained about the lobster in aspic being dropped was a<em> tour de force</em>." -- Robert Beattie, <strong><a contents="seenandheard-international.com&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://seenandheard-international.com/2018/10/wexfords-european-premiere-of-william-bolcoms-dinner-at-eight/" style="">seenandheard-international.com</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>"...Bolcom’s music is an eclectic mix of styles, </strong>combining many elements, including Broadway and jazz waltz and tango, which is mainly tonal, sometimes atonal, or as David Agler, the festival director, was reported to have observed, “tonal music with a few dirty notes,” with plenty of rhythmic variations to quickly change the direction of the mood. ...Bolcom’s music not only convinced in its own right, but it had a dramatic momentum which displayed a deep understanding of the theatre. It was never one-paced; the well-crafted libretto, allied to the varied musical styles, sparkling orchestration, quicksilver variations in rhythm and tempo, and the immediate accessible melodies of the score, ensured it was a very well-received production." -- Alan Neilson, <a contents="Operawire.com" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://operawire.com/wexford-festival-opera-2018-review-dinner-at-eight/" target="_blank"><strong>Operawire.com</strong></a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/5605617
2019-01-21T12:33:59-06:00
2019-01-21T12:33:59-06:00
In conversation with Chamber Music Society
<p>CMS of Lincoln Center has been celebrating various composers' 80 years of experience, craft, and skill. They recently sat down with William Bolcom to learn more about his illustrious career, his influences, and his landmark works.</p><!-- more -->
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/a7d27c1acfadda9ed8219d411534b990ee37aaf8/original/screenshot-2019-01-21-12-23-00.png/!!/b:W10=.png" class="size_l justify_center border_" /></p>
<p><em>Would you divide your work into “periods”? Have there been certain “landmarks” that you would say marked new compositional styles? </em></p>
<p>I suppose so. My earliest works were influenced by Bartók and Roy Harris quartets, especially the landmark of Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite, whose music got me to write 12 string quartets from age 11 (the year I heard the Berg done by the Juilliard Quartet) to age 79. (I don’t play any string instrument.) My next big influence in my teens was Beethoven and my early quartets show this. Written just before my 21st birthday, my 6th quartet is the landmark of my finding my own language, helped along by the encouragement and open attitude of Darius Milhaud, with whom I studied at Aspen in 1957 and later at the Paris Conservatoire. Ives (whom I’d also discovered at 10) became a larger influence, as well as my exposure to Boulez and Luciano Berio in Paris; these enter in my first Fantasy-Sonata for Piano in 1961, another landmark work. </p>
<p>As with so many other composers, I was pulled into the total-chromatic style of the 1950s through the 80s. Eventually I found this restrictive and began about 1967 to rediscover tonality and explore ways of linking simple tonality with more complex music in the outer reaches of tonality, which I am still practicing, and incorporating American classic popular music in the mix, possibly starting with my discovery of ragtime. </p>
<p>My growing interest in ragtime, mostly of Joplin (whose music I had a hand in discovering for the classical music world) pulled me out of any vestige of academic peer pressure. The landmark work of this stance is my full-evening setting of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience,in which whatever musical style suggested to me in each particular poem dictated the resulting songs' setting-styles. This would be the fruit of 25 years’ work, which had never been animated by the notion of seeing how many styles I could use, as some have accused I’ve done. I just went with where the poem took me, sometimes into areas I’d never guessed (country & western for “The Shepherd” for example, which I fought with at first until I realized it wouldn’t go away). </p>
<p><em>Going further with that, you have had several influences - you mention the importance of great American singer/song-writers (such as Irving Berlin) and pop music, you mention that you were influenced early on by French music, and obviously your duo with your wife, Joan, would have some impact on how and what you write. Could you discuss a bit more about how you have incorporated some of these things into your output? </em></p>
<p>What working with Joan has enabled me to do is study prosody — word-setting — American style, particularly Berlin, whose solutions influenced the whole field of songwriting from both a composer’s and a performer’s points of view. My study has resulted in a style of prosody rooted in the classic American songmasters. I seek links between the various musics I know in search of a larger unity. </p>
<p>My love and knowledge of French music came from my piano teacher from age 8 on, Mme. Berthe Poncy Jacobson at the University of Washington School of Music in Seattle who, as a friend of Poulenc’s, was sent scores of his piano music; I would take them home. (At the time most conservatories and music schools were Austro-German-music oriented, and French music was thought inferior.) </p>
<p>From age 11 until my graduation from high school at 17 I spent every Thursday in piano and composition lessons where I studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration at the University of Washington; my principal teacher in composition was John Verrall who had been at the London Royal Academy of Music and had worked with Kodály. (I never worked with the music programs in US public schools.) </p>
<p><em>Do you have a “ritual” or a “process” each time you compose? </em></p>
<p>Not that I’m aware of. </p>
<p><em>Are there certain things you need in order to work? </em></p>
<p>Time, mostly, and as much tranquility as possible (though in my theater-music days I'd often have to compose “on the fly”). I don’t use a piano. </p>
<p><em>Obviously a significant part of your career has been as an educator. In your 35 years at the University of Michigan, was there sort of a “universal message” that you wanted your students to come away with? </em></p>
<p>First, get your skills (counterpoint, harmony) and study the music of the last millennium so that you can write fluently. Second, to find your style it is not a question of patenting one in order to “establish your brand” as some may try to do, as you’ll risk boxing yourself in. If you follow your interests, your style will find you.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em><strong>View Bolcom's Three Rags for String Quartet - Recorded live by the Escher String Quartet in Alice Tully Hall on May 21, 2017.</strong></em></p>
<p><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/274953054" width="640"></iframe></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/5431485
2018-07-28T00:45:00-05:00
2018-09-17T06:47:43-05:00
San Francisco Chronicle: Bolcom, eclectic at 80, returns to the Cabrillo Festival
<p>"In his music — a vast and varied catalog that includes symphonies, operas, chamber music and song cycles — the most ingratiating and accessible strains keep company with gnarled dissonances."</p><!-- more -->
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/047818432de80e3f7ec8b037e891471b53110d1a/original/screenshot-2018-09-17-06-44-27.png/!!/b:W10=.png" class="size_l justify_center border_" /></p>
<h2>Composer William Bolcom, eclectic at 80, returns to the Cabrillo Festival </h2>
<p>Joshua Kosman July 28, 2018 Updated: July 28, 2018 11:27 a.m.</p>
<p>Trying to pin down a stylistic profile for the composer William Bolcom is a mug’s game, a bout of Whac-a-Mole against an elusive and wily opponent. </p>
<p>In his music — a vast and varied catalog that includes symphonies, operas, chamber music and song cycles — the most ingratiating and accessible strains keep company with gnarled dissonances. Ragtime and tango, Mozartean pastiche and full-scale modernism all take turns at center stage. </p>
<p>The reason for this omnivorous but carefully controlled hodgepodge is perfectly simple, says Bolcom. </p>
<p>“I have a huge palette of things I want to express,” he says. “So I just take what I want. And then if the styles are different, I try to make sure they’re talking to each other as seamlessly as possible.” </p>
<p>Bolcom, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, was on the phone from the home he shares in Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife and longtime collaborator, the soprano Joan Morris. He was gearing up for a return to Northern California and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, where he was a regular presence during the 1970s and ’80s. </p>
<p>The second concert of the festival, on Saturday, Aug. 4, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, will include a performance of his 1983 Violin Concerto, with the Russian-born violinist Philippe Quint as soloist and Artistic Director Cristian Macelaru conducting. The piece, with its confluence of jazz and classical strains, is as representative a taste of Bolcom’s eclecticism as anyone could wish for. </p>
<p>In this case, though, he says he was influenced by the example of the Romanian American violinist Sergiu Luca, for whom the concerto was written. </p>
<p>“I got to know him in 1972 when he was first starting out,” he recalls. “Sergiu was a very fiery performer, and he was the first classical violinist I ever ran into who knew or cared about the jazz violin tradition. He befriended Joe Venuti, which is really where that whole tradition began.”</p>
<p><a contents="Read More" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/music/article/Composer-William-Bolcom-eclectic-at-80-returns-13112230.php#photo-15931735" style="">Read More</a></p>
<h4>More Information </h4>
<p>Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 3; 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 4. $20-$65. Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church St., Santa Cruz. 831-426-6966. www.cabrillomusic.org </p>
<p> </p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/5278116
2018-06-05T21:31:20-05:00
2018-06-05T21:36:33-05:00
An American Legend: Composer William Bolcom at 80
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/c6e2e476dccef28a91f260142b843ae16fa13224/original/jennifer-hambrick.jpg/!!/b:W1sic2l6ZSIsInNtYWxsIl1d.jpg" class="size_s justify_right border_" />An interview with classical music radio host Jennifer Hambrick of WOSU Public Media, Columbus, OH </p><!-- more -->
<p><em>He was pivotal in reviving the American musical genre of ragtime. He has composed music in a range of styles that all but erases the lines between art music and popular music. </em></p>
<p><em>And he has taught and mentored some of the foremost composers in America today — including some working right here in Central Ohio. </em></p>
<p><em>Now, he's turning 80. I'd say that's cause for celebration. </em></p>
<p><em>Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer William Bolcom celebrates his birthday this Saturday, May 26. </em></p>
<p>Enjoy a 6-minute interview online at radio.wosu.org. <a contents="http://radio.wosu.org/post/american-legend-composer-william-bolcom-80#stream/0" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://radio.wosu.org/post/american-legend-composer-william-bolcom-80#stream/0" target="_blank">http://radio.wosu.org/post/american-legend-composer-william-bolcom-80#stream/0</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/5278097
2018-06-05T21:16:19-05:00
2018-06-05T21:16:19-05:00
Wild Plum Arts posts Bolcom videos on "being a composer, and many other things"
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/1b888497de0dc75e8b5f81e7a2642b5192efdb24/original/screenshot-2018-06-05-21-12-58.png/!!/b:W1sic2l6ZSIsIm1lZGl1bSJdXQ==.png" class="size_m justify_right border_" />A non-profit based in the UK, Wild Plum Arts nurtures composers through commission, promotion, and performance.</p><!-- more -->
<p>New videos posted on their website feature interviews with William Bolcom and Joan Morris. As they say, "We like to let composers speak, uninterrupted. Please look out for our growing list of videos and visit our website <a contents="www.wilpldlumarts.org.uk" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.wilpldlumarts.org.uk" style="" target="_blank">www.wilpldlumarts.org.uk</a>."</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>VIDEO 1: </strong>William Bolcom, along with his wife and muse, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, talks to Wild Plum Arts about being an American composer, his legacy, Milhaud, Hindemith, dessert...</p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sXqhVJZ_YkY" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>VIDEO 2:</strong> William Bolcom talks to Wild Plum Arts about his discovery of Scott Joplin in the 1960s and Joplin's (and John Cage's) influence on his work.</p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6WCr9ctS08o" width="560"></iframe></p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>VIDEO 3:</strong> William Bolcom on working with Arnold Weinstein, with whom he wrote the twelve Minicab songs, four of which feature in the Wild Plum Arts project "<a contents="The Class of 1938," data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/whats-on/lucy-schaufer-huw-watkins-201806292200" style="" target="_self">The Class of 1938,</a>" a performance in London on June 29, 2018. </p>
<p><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/d1t1upAbdRI" width="560"></iframe></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4925234
2017-11-08T21:18:29-06:00
2017-11-08T21:18:29-06:00
"Sextet" gains positive reviews in Oregon, Santa Fe press
<p>Critics applaud Bolcom's timely new work for "unusual consort of clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, cello and piano" </p><!-- more -->
<h4>Oregon Artswatch </h4>
<p><em>Terry Ross, July 26, 2017 </em></p>
<p>In its six movements, for the unusual consort of clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, violin, cello and piano, all playing in the multitonal, eclectic style that has ruled contemporary music in recent years, Sextet is SERIOUS… The three-minute opening movement Pastorale is anything but; edgy and nervous, it is thoroughly urban in its texture and mood. Then, after a three-minute march and a two-minute Nocturne, we encounter Catastrophe, a rhythmic, bestial outburst reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, followed by extreme stillness and then again the outburst. This leads us into the heart of the piece, the fifth movement’s Variation and Theme, based on a Christian hymn called “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” with its conventional harmonies, which is the only truly hopeful section of the piece. Sextet then ends with a one-minute Coda. Coming after the Martinu, it was a breath of musical modernism: not atonal, not relentlessly dissonant, earnest and often quietly expressive. </p>
<p><a contents="Read the complete review" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.orartswatch.org/chamber-music-northwest-review-variable-variations/" style="" target="_blank">Read the complete review </a></p>
<h4>Santa Fe New Mexican - Pasatiempo </h4>
<p><em>James M. Keller, August 25, 2017 </em></p>
<p>The Sextet is indeed dark, though it is not depressing. It seems to honor various composers who have come before. The opening Pastorale may hark back to Stravinsky or, more directly, to Milhaud, who was one of Bolcom’s teachers. Next comes a March; it owes something to Kurt Weill. The Nocturne has a Franco-American flavor reminiscent of early Copland. None of the movements are mere imitation, though, and all of them are convincingly crafted. A gritty, sustained expanse titled Catastrophe serves as a portal to the Variation and Theme, which is not cheerful on the whole. The “Lift Every Voice” melody is worked tightly into the texture, and at one point it is intoned by the trumpet. The moment is reminiscent of a similar turn in the finale of Honegger’s Symphony No. 2, which was written in Paris in 1941, during the Nazi occupation. There a trumpet joins the anxious strings that surround it, sounding a chorale that gleams with resolution and proposes the possibility of triumph even against a background of despair. That was also its effect here. In a coda, Bolcom has the violin whisper what sounded like a phrase from “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Was it intended as that? Was it meant to suggest comfort? Or is it possible that Bolcom’s “taking a chance here” had to do with a more sinister treetop — with lynching? I hope we will have an opportunity to hear this piece again and see what emotions it inspires on a repeat visit. </p>
<p><a contents="Read the complete review" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/columns/listen_up/covering-the-musical-waterfront/article_613f4f55-3ee5-52a9-88e3-205eb8f31a7f.html" style="" target="_blank">Read the complete review</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4925233
2017-11-08T21:14:01-06:00
2017-11-08T21:14:01-06:00
Bruce Duffie: An interview with William Bolcom (1992)
<p>An interview conducted by Bruce Duffie in Chicago in November, 1992. Award winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM.</p><!-- more -->
<p>BD: You’ve just completed McTeague, a huge work for Lyric Opera. I assume you consider this a huge work? </p>
<p>WB: It’s a good-sized one, probably bigger than Songs of Innocence and Experience. I wanted to have a full evening but a tight show. I didn’t want a three-hour opera, so we’ve actually ended up with one that’s two hours of music, and that seems big enough for me, considering the way we handle the story. </p>
<p>BD: Big enough for you as the composer, or big enough for the audience as listeners and viewers? </p>
<p>WB: It depends on the story. Some stories require longer time in telling. This was a full-scale nineteenth century novel. It came out in 1899, and became a nine or ten-hour movie [made in 1924, directed by Erich von Stroheim] called Greed. No one knows how many hours it really was. </p>
<p>BD: A lot of it’s lost, unfortunately. </p>
<p>WB: Yes. The story I hear was that it all was thrown in the Catalina Island sound somewhere, and the fishes have probably eaten it up. </p>
<p>BD: [Wistfully] Wouldn’t it be interesting if they found the film-cans and they were still sealed? </p>
<p>WB: Wouldn’t it be wonderful! I’d love to see it all some time. My exposure to the film, which was coming from the novel McTeague, is probably one of the reasons I was interested in this particular story. I was very impressed by the story in the movie... what there is left of it! It may be a mess as far as everything is concerned, but there’s some very powerful moments in it, and the ending is very strong. </p>
<p>BD: Regarding the size of the work, aside from the obvious differences, what are the main changes that go through your mind when you’re working on a huge work as opposed to a shorter work, or even just a song? </p>
<p>WB: It depends on the work that you’re starting with. Some pieces call for a multifarious approach. There are things I’ve wanted to do that would require a very varied approach. Here, despite some of the critical comments — they had troubles dealing with the various styles, which is their problem not mine, and obviously not the audiences, either — over time people are beginning to realize that this is what I do and that’s how it is. I have probably used fewer types of molds — or if you’d rather call them styles— than in something like The Songs of Innocence and Experience, which was done here six years ago at Grant Park, and will be done this month by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony, both in St. Louis and New York. That work has forty-six poems by William Blake and is a group of poems that are extremely varied in approach, and therefore they are many different situations. Here in McTeague, we have a novel which is full of all kinds of subcharacters, and a truncated film, but underneath it all is a very simple, straightforward story. Our approach — Bob Altman and Arnold Weinstein and myself — was to reduce it to this fable kind of level where you’re really telling a story that is as tight a Grimm’s Fairy Tale. We really did cut down on the number of characters and sub-plots and other things that could be found in the book and the film, so it came out to the right length. As operas go, this is rather a short one. </p>
<p>BD: Two hours, with one intermission? </p>
<p>WB: Yes, it’s a nice length. It’s certainly right for this work. We could have taken the opposite approach and try to pick up every single thing in the book, which is what the movie Greed did... </p>
<p>BD: … or tried to do! </p>
<p>WB: Right, and probably did do, but we’ll never know because so much of it is lost. I have seen a book of stills of all of the scenes that were shot, and you have an idea of the enormity of the enterprise. It showed terrific ambitiousness. </p>
<p>BD: Should someone with a computer take the stills and remake it into a nine-hour film? [In 1999, Turner Entertainment created a four-hour version of Greed that used existing stills of cut scenes to reconstruct the film.] </p>
<p>WB: Why??? Leave it as it is! Even the truncated thing is still wonderful in its ways. Would you like to put the head back onto the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre? There’s a point where somebody decides that the part of what is left to us has been left to us because of the situation. I don’t think it’s necessarily right that it should be all that’s left by fate. Monteverdi wrote forty operas, and we have just two or three of them. That’s all there is. I’d love to know what the other thirty-seven are like, but they could not possibly be reconstructed by computer. </p>
<p>Suppose we have some kind of atomic destruction here, and all that’s left of McTeague are a couple of scenes. Would you want someone to go back and reconstruct it from a broadcast tape? </p>
<p>WB: No! I used to think it was a good idea to reconstruct things. I finished an unfinished Schubert sonata, and I actually finished one of the Iberia numbers of Albeniz which he didn’t finish himself. They’re perfectly all right as ‘finishings’, and it’s all right if you want to put them in concert for people who need to have everything finished up, but I wouldn’t do it today. I don’t think I did such a bad job, as it turns out, on the C Major Sonata of Schubert. Krenek also did the same thing, but I never compared his finishing to mine. </p>
<p>BD: It would be interesting to see if you arrived at the same place. </p>
<p>WB: I rather doubt we did. In fact, I did see something that seemed sort of prolix and kind of meandering. I tried to do something closer to what I thought was meant, but whatever happens, why do it? We have lots of other things that we could finish, and if something has gone from the past, then that means there’s more room for something new to come in its place. Maybe our nineteenth and twentieth century pack-driven mentality is so over-populating our artistic universe with such an awful lot of wonderful things that there’s no room for new thing. It may be possibly understandable that there were some terrible holocausts, and that left the remaining humans room to reconstruct their own culture. Maybe a few shards and pieces of pottery and odd things are left over from theirs, but it won’t be the first time it’s happened after all. </p>
<p>BD: We’ve a few relics, but otherwise we have to start over? </p>
<p>WB: I can’t worry about all that. </p>
<p>BD: Is there too much music around? </p>
<p>WB: No, there’s simply people who don’t listen to it, which makes it too much music because they put it on all day and never really listen to what they have going on all day. So it becomes a kind of drug. There is too much music than requires thorough listening, but I can’t really say that there’s too much music. I’m simply saying there aren’t enough listeners who really listen. </p>
<p>BD: [With a gentle nudge] So you expect your audience who comes to hear your piece to really listen? </p>
<p>WB: I hope they will! You do what you can to make them do that, or at least induce to do that, but you can’t make them do that. I always think of that line from William Blake where he says, “I give you the end of the golden string, only wind it up into a ball.” A lot of people might see the end of the golden string being tendered to them, but the actual effort of winding it up into a ball may be more than they’re ready to do. They may have it all thrown at them, and there’s only so much you can do to get them to do that winding. </p>
<p>BD: Should your music be for everyone — the ones who wind and the ones who don’t wind? </p>
<p>WB: I give it to anyone who wants it, and that’s what anybody who writes, does. If they get it, wonderful! If they don’t get it, also wonderful! I certainly don’t make it difficult for them, but I’m not going to give away all of the marbles either. </p>
<p>BD: Do you have the audience in mind while you’re writing? </p>
<p>WB: I have myself as the audience. I can’t figure out what they want, but I do imagine myself as audience, and have to assume that there is a certain constant between me as audience and them as audience, and it usually has worked as far as timing. I do know that there is somewhere a sense of relationship between myself and an audience. I like very much what Yo-Yo Ma says about a kind of circle, that it is almost an electrical current that goes between the performer, the work and the audience. So you have the piece, you have the performer, you have the audience, and you get a circuit going, and the whole idea is to keep that circuit going. That’s something you can deal with. You can sense when the circuit begins to flutter, and you can sense when the circuit is overloaded. You try very hard to keep a certain control over the electricity so that this constant thing keeps going. </p>
<p>BD: Without it just becoming feedback? </p>
<p>WB: That’s right. You have all kinds of means of doing it, but the point is you do try to keep a relationship going. That’s why it’s very important for people who are writing or composing to have at least some very deep sense of what it is to perform. Through circumstance, serendipity, or whatever, I have continued to perform in some way or another through most of my composing life, and I’m very thankful for it because it does give one a certain sense of timing. It might make it less mysterious to an audience than if I had not stopped performing, and that might make it very difficult for critics to deal with because they don’t have any need to have to deal with their usual self-imposed notion of having to be translator for the audience — which I don’t think they do terribly well half the time because most of them are not able to read music! A very simple case in point is that 187 critics have come to McTeague, but only twelve asked for the vocal score. </p>
<p>BD: Is that a good thing or a bad thing? </p>
<p>WB: It means they really don’t know music. They know records. They are ‘record-heads’, and that’s perfectly okay. I have nothing against ‘record-heads’, but they’re not critics. </p>
<p>BD: Or are they coming without the vocal score because they are assuming they should see what the audience sees without any help or crutch? </p>
<p>WB: Then why don’t they become audience themselves? If they learn how to be audience, they’d be better critics. </p>
<p>BD: [Playing Devil’s Advocate] If they saw the vocal score, then they might see something they could understand more than an audience member who hasn’t seen the vocal score. </p>
<p>That’s what the vocal score is for, and if they’re able to read music, they could understand it a little bit better and come with a certain amount of information. But they can’t read music, so they have no right to talk. </p>
<p>BD: So the whole audience should get vocal scores??? We should have 3,600 vocal scores in the lobby for them? </p>
<p>No, I just say it is a matter of what you decide. When you decide you can set yourself up as a critic and impose yourself as such, you’re taking on certain responsibilities. If you’re going to do that, then you want to have the credentials to do it, and I don’t actually honestly believe that most critics who are setting themselves up as critics have those credentials. </p>
<p>BD: Should we get rid of critics? </p>
<p>WB: No, I want good ones. I want those who know something. It would be analogous to having criticism in the field of English literature by people who couldn’t read, and I’m afraid that’s the situation we have. If you’re going to take on the job as a translator, or an introductory person to people who are asking you for this kind of information, then you have a certain responsibility. In a way you’re a teacher, and maybe that’s the whole point of it. It also is possible that people who start out as critics, particularly in Europe, used it as a way to break into the literature field. Don't forget about most of Shaw’s criticism when he was a young man. It was a way for him to break into print, and how many others can you think of as the same case? </p>
<p>BD: Corno di Bassetto! [Bassett Horn, the pen-name Shaw used.] </p>
<p>WB: Exactly, and Debussy wrote criticism as a young man, too. Tchaikovsky did it for a while, and then other people did. It was something you did as a young person to give yourself some sort of an introduction. </p>
<p>BD: Schumann also did it. </p>
<p>WB: Yes, but he also was interested in continuing the whole publishing notion, which was informing. He looked at it as being a teacher. He was very much a teacher. He thought of it as teaching. I don’t find too many critics today that think of their own job as teaching. They tend to be basically opinion-mongering, and I don’t find that very interesting, even from the ones who were kind to one’s music. I would rather see a situation where they really took the time to do it. Unfortunately, that’s partly the way things are today. One has to criticize, which is say at least review six or eight concerts in a week, and that’s an awful lot for anybody to do. Naturally, or eventually, inevitably you find yourself going towards short-cuts. How can you not? </p>
<p>* * * * * </p>
<p>BD: Let’s get off of the critics... </p>
<p>WB: Yes, let’s leave them alone. I’d much rather not think about them. </p>
<p>BD: ...and come back to being a composer. You were talking about writing for yourself. Have you figured out what it is you want, or is this a constant learning experience for you in finding new things that you want? </p>
<p>WB: I’d be more likely to accept the latter because otherwise I’d have it all decided and there’d be no reason to go on. You’re always trying to find out what you want to do next, and the thing eventually introduces itself to you. You try to keep yourself aware of those things. There’s a lot of work involved, and it always changes. Five or six years ago I didn’t know I’d be writing this opera. But now I have done it, and there it is, and it’s on the boards, and people are singing it and playing it, and I have to go onto the next thing. </p>
<p>BD: When you’re sitting down at the paper and it’s essentially or completely blank, and you start writing notes, are you always controlling your hand that’s putting the notes on the paper? </p>
<p>WB: Of course! </p>
<p>BD: The hand never controls you? </p>
<p>WB: No, but the piece might control me. It’s the movement of the hand, isn’t it? Once you start a particular animal going, it reveals itself to you, and you have to listen very carefully to what it wants to do. But at the same time, you have to keep your control. It’s like a horse and rider. There are some relationships like that. Sometimes you’re a horse and sometimes you’re a rider, but there is a relationship, and that is how it’s done. </p>
<p>BD: Are you ever surprised by where the horse will lead you? </p>
<p>WB: Occasionally, but then I have to take the lead and say maybe this is what it is. I think half of my composing has been, “Oh, my God, is this where’s it leading? Oh, right. I’ll go with it.” That, of course, is great excitement and surprise, and also it tends to bedevil our friends the critics, of course. [Both laugh] I no longer seem to fit with their notion of what I should be doing. </p>
<p>BD: Does a piece ever say to you, “Oh, my God, where have we gotten???” </p>
<p>WB: Occasionally, and then sometimes I have to find where I am. Then I spend time getting myself out. So you just backtrack and go back to where you were. But in the end, I have loved the idea of when the mind goes and takes leaps that you never have imagined it would take. That’s when it gets to be fun. </p>
<p>BD: When you’re tinkering with it and you put in the double bar, how do you know when to stop, when it’s done, when it’s ready to be launched? </p>
<p>WB: It sort of tells you, but there is also an awful lot of experience and technique, and I do very strongly believe in the technique. It’s not a very bourgeois notion because novels and movies have this idea there’s some sort of weird spiritual thing is going on, like angels singing to you. One of the fun things is to collect the notions that people have in movies about how tunes come to composers. They’re very funny. In many cases, angels sing them to you as they float by, and they’re always absolutely off the mark. That’s not how it happens. It never can be the way it happens. </p>
<p>BD: Can you explain how it happens? </p>
<p>WB: No! [Both laugh] I would certainly not want to even if I could because it would be the kind of thing that one would have to keep as a secret. But I don’t think you can explain it. It’s one of those things that has to do with the machinery that is going on in the mind, which, if it were explicable, would then be words. That’s the whole point. We’re dealing with a new language which has its own rules, and they tend to reveal themselves to you over time. But I do believe that you acquire the ability and the means of setting down exactly what you want, and that is what I would call ‘technique’. </p>
<p>BD: Do the rules evolve over time? </p>
<p>WB: Constantly. </p>
<p>BD: So when you discover a rule, was it not a rule but just a very temporary waystation? </p>
<p>WB: That’s sort of it. The next time around you’re talking about the next one. Once it becomes case-hardened a rule, there has to be a really major dynamite blast or two to push things out of that situation. Most of the early part of the twentieth century was trying to get rid of rules, for they had become a very codified harmonic style. So people did all kinds of dreadfully anti-establishment moves for a lot of plain, simply draconian anachronisms to blow things up. [This was probably the reasoning behind Pierre Boulez’s published remark, “Opera Houses? Blow them up!”, which actually got him into serious trouble with the police some years later, as can be seen in the interview.] That’s fine, and we had to do it. It was one of the necessary moves of getting out of what would have otherwise been a kind of super-Richard Straussian kind of harmony taken to its final destination. We had to throw all that out, and then we came back to find what survives. There is a certain amount of that which happens, particularly in music, and some people have said that ours is the longest Mannerist Period in the history of art — which is most of the twentieth century. Now we’re in the process of finding out what is viable in all of that material. </p>
<p>BD: Who decides if it’s viable — the composers, the public, who? </p>
<p>WB: The composers in the end, but the point is that the composer again is part of the circuit. There you are with the performer and the composer and the public, and when you get that machinery and electricity going, then we have something that has a real viability. The validity is that the current moves. It working and we are making a connection. It’s the kind of thing that absolute bedevils any critic because they are often looking for rules, and there aren’t any. </p>
<p>BD: No rules at all? </p>
<p>The rules impose themselves as the piece progresses. </p>
<p>BD: Are they the same new rules each time? </p>
<p>WB: I’d have to say the same thing. They are things that would be parallel to what you might call grammar and syntax, and any kind of language function. Those things continue. They are tendencies, and they tend toward comprehensive ability, and they have a certain atmosphere about them. But you don’t write the literature out of grammar. Grammar guides you toward a certain discipline and comprehensive ability, but it does not generate what you’re writing about. It makes it possible to communicate to someone else in a clear way, but it does not create ‘the idea’. The rules will not generate anything. No system nor little notion will save you. We’ve had a pile of them in the last century or so, yet at the same time this or that system or procedure can generate a discipline, which can help you hold what you’re doing and bring to it a certain level of control. But that’s another story. Then you’re making the rules, or, if you want, the tendencies or the syntactical phenomenal to work for you. But they will not generate the idea. </p>
<p>BD: So once it’s all written down, then you can look back and see what rules were used? </p>
<p>You might notice tendencies. I do notice sometimes that I will find a piece that will generate certain things. “Oh, is that what I’m doing?” I always tell my students to ask themselves, “What am I doing?” Look back and take a look at what you are doing. Don’t do it in such a way that you’re going to inhibit yourself, but once in a while take a good hard look at what’s happening in there, and be as objective as you can. Then go back into the piece again. That way you have a certain sense of what’s happening. Yes, there is definitely a kind of syntax that grows out of every piece. It is slightly different in every piece, and sometimes it’s very different, but you have to have a mixture of self-awareness and total heedlessness. </p>
<p>BD: That way you know what you are doing? </p>
<p>WB: Sure. </p>
<p>BD: Then my question is, why are you doing it? </p>
<p>WB: Because I can’t help it! I’m a composer! [Both laugh] </p>
<p>* * * * * </p>
<p>BD: Here is a more general question but aiming at the same target. What’s the purpose of music? </p>
<p>WB: If there were a purpose, then we should all just throw up our hands and do something else. Its purpose is itself. You do it because that is what you do. I think of art as a big totality. If there was a nice, interesting, simple answer to it all, then there’d be no reason to go on. Once you figure out the purpose then you might as well say, “Okay, fine, QED, let’s go onto something else.” I can’t do that. If I could explain it to myself then why should I bother go on? I’m not pretending to be dumb but I’m simply saying that the thing in itself is its own purpose. </p>
<p>BD: Then are you always searching for it? </p>
<p>WB: Of course! Well, I’m not necessarily searching for the purpose, I’m searching for the next piece. This happens to be what I do but, as I said, I cannot help doing. Anybody who’s a committed artist and this kind of person would probably, often as not, be perfectly happy to be able to pull the whole thing over and forget about it. It’s only amateurs’ block to the artists. You can’t help with it if you are one, and it would be very nice to be able to get that burden off your back, but you can’t help it. There you are, you’re doing it, and the darn thing has its control over you, but you can’t wait to get back to work. </p>
<p>BD: Are you glad for the burden to be on your back? </p>
<p>WB: I have no choice. </p>
<p>BD: So you’ve made a friend of it? </p>
<p>WB: At least I’ve made some kind of a roommate. </p>
<p>BD: [Laughs] Roommates can be co-operative, or roommates can be irritating! </p>
<p>WB: Oh, I can’t kick this one out. It’s paying the rent! [Both laugh] </p>
<p>BD: [With a gentle nudge] Oh, come on... composing is more than just your job! </p>
<p>WB: It is always a job. Probably it’s the most labor-intensive of the arts, although if you talked to any artist they’ll always tell you that every one is labor-intensive. When I think about the amount of time it takes to write the notes of an orchestral score, just to be finished with one minute of music, especially with the whole orchestra on full tilt, I would be very surprised that the same amount of work would be put into pretty much anything else. In his autobiography, Aaron Copland is complaining about the same thing — that no one else seems to understand the amount of sheer drudgery that goes into writing the score. </p>
<p>BD: Is it not true that every note gets its little moment? </p>
<p>WB: Every note gets its little moment, but it’s a very small moment. I’ve written millions of notes. Any composer who has ever been a professional has written millions of notes, and they all have their little moments. </p>
<p>BD: But every little moment becomes a sound at some place in performance. </p>
<p>WB: Sure it does, and that’s what you’re doing. You’re dealing with putting together all these sounds. That’s the way it’s done. That’s what’s known as being a composer — you’re putting things together. That’s what the word means. </p>
<p>BD: You noted earlier that you have taken a lot of these styles and put them together. It seems in your music that instead of being a ‘soup’, it’s much more of a ‘salad’. </p>
<p>I don’t know what you mean. </p>
<p>BD: In a soup everything melds together and becomes one homogenous entity, whereas each item in a salad retains its own distinct character. </p>
<p>WB: Oh, I see. It depends on the piece. I’ve made soups and I’ve made salads. [Continuing the metaphor] I’ve made casseroles and I’ve made the kinds of pieces that I can cook and serve as a reasonably extensive repertoire of recipes. It depends on what the occasion calls for. </p>
<p>BD: With your notoriety, you must be inundated with requests and offers. How do you decide which ones you will accept and which ones you’ll turn aside? </p>
<p>WB: If they’re interesting artists, that helps. If they have enough to pay for my time, that definitely helps because my time is valuable and I only have so much of it, so you tend to husband it. But things tend to work out that way. I’ve done things for nothing, I’ve done things for lots of money, and I put the same care into both. It’s just that you do have to at least somehow try to make a part of your living in this process because there’s an awful of labor-intensiveness. When I think back at the actual number of notes that went into McTeague, and if I counted the money I was paid, I would say it probably came to about a dollar and a half an hour, which is way below the minimum wage. </p>
<p>BD: So obviously you’re getting more than just the dollars in your pocket. </p>
<p>WB: Of course, because I’m sure there’d be ways to make a heck of a lot better money for less work, but what can I say? That’s what I picked to do, and it’s a good piece. I never really thought seriously of doing anything else. That’s what I do. </p>
<p>BD: You seem to have contradicted yourself. You say you picked to do it, when I thought it picked you. </p>
<p>WB: I did say that, really. It picked me. I really have had no choice. I was always going to be a composer, and I can’t remember ever looking seriously at doing anything else... except, of course, being a musician, which I am. I’m also a pianist. I’m an accompanist for my wife, Joan Morris, as one of my major, major things in life, and I’m a professor. I teach composition to budding composers — which is something that is really essential, but impossible. You really can’t teach it, but what you can do is help the students. You can guide them a bit. You can at least open doors for them, but you can’t push them through. </p>
<p>BD: What are the main things you see coming off the pages of your students? </p>
<p>WB: They come out to a place like Michigan because probably we have a reputation — not only me, but my colleagues have been very open to many American vernacular styles. My colleague, Bill Albright, has been very involved with Ragtime, and Michael Daugherty, who is new with us, has been involved with Rock and also with the various popular electronic things. But all of us have very strong classical background, and this the armature on which everything was hung. So we do essentially what has happened throughout the ages, which is to say an amalgam of popular and historical and classical styles, to put together a structure that will be comprehensible and also have the resonance that you wouldn’t have had without that background. I don’t think this is very different from the mandate of any composer throughout the history of music. Palestrina put little pop tunes of his day in his ‘cantus firmuses’, and Monteverdi took popular styles and popular dances and put them into an opera which was meant to have been a revival of the ancient Greek tragedy. You can call case after case of opera styles that have been put in and subsumed into a larger structure throughout the history of music. I find what I am doing is exactly that. </p>
<p>BD: Has it changed a bit now that it has gotten away from being a toy of the aristocracy, and being for everyone? </p>
<p>WB: I don’t think it was ever really a toy of the aristocracy. In the strictest sense it was for everyone, however, the audience changes. The aristocracy could pay for it for a while. Later you had subscription concerts, from the eighteenth century onwards, where other people started to pay for it. Later it became a tool, if you like, or a toy of the button manufacturers in the beginnings of the bourgeoisie. Every one of these people helps pay for the continuation of something which is essentially, in some weird way, non-profit. It’s because they truly want it, not because it’s going to make them any money. Nowadays, once the composer or the generator is gone you could put the work into a museum of one kind or another. It could be an art museum where you hadn’t to pay any longer because it’s past any kind of royalties. You can do the same thing to an opera house or a symphony orchestra because these fellows are long gone. There’s no estate to worry about, and they’re going to have a grand old time playing. One of the reasons people concentrate on older music is that it costs less to make. You don’t have to pay the living guy, who’s a pain in the rear because he keeps making things tough on you. He keeps wanting to correct your notes; he has definitely no sense of style; he’s an irritant. It’s much nicer to deal with older folks, and you can get scholarly conferences to talk about historical accuracy, and have Historically Informed Performances which follow metronomic markings, which any composer will tell you are not trusted. Nowadays, people are organizing whole aesthetics around what Beethoven might have marked in a particular movement, where half the time, I’m sure, the metronome wasn’t working properly. Schumann’s hardly worked right, and I know I’ve done with a broken one for years! </p>
<p>BD: How accurate do you want your music to be when it’s reproduced? </p>
<p>WB: I want the same current between performer, the audience, and the artists. True artists find their place in that community of electricity, that circle which Yo-Yo Ma talks about so well. A really good performer will perform accurately — sometimes more accurately than I’ve written it! </p>
<p>BD: [Mildly shocked] How can that possibly be? </p>
<p>WB: Because, for example, tempo notions tend to develop and settle themselves when a really good performer who is on that track gets in there. Dennis Davies was able to say, “No, that wasn’t the right tempo, this is the right tempo,” and when I heard it I had to admit he was right and I was wrong. I wrote down the wrong one. </p>
<p>BD: Has he figured out what you really wanted? </p>
<p>WB: Yes, because we’ve been on that circuit for a long time. I’ve worked with this man for twenty-five years. </p>
<p>* * * * * </p>
<p>BD: Earlier you said that if some of a piece is lost for some reason, you don’t want it re-created, re-established, but how much re-establishing do you expect from the score while it’s there? </p>
<p>WB: We’re not talking about the same thing. You’re talking about finishing out the fragments of works. We were talking earlier about that, and it’s not the same thing. Any piece of written-out music is an imperfect transcript of what the music is supposed to be because our notation is severely limited. It’s pretty good in many ways, but it really does not impart the notions of style, particularly if we’re talking about something like Popular Style, which was essentially what people used to always equate as the style. People talk about the eighteenth century ‘notes inégales’, the unequal notes. How do you play Couperin or Bach, or something like that? This was, in a way, very analogous to popular styles that everybody knows. How’s the Shuffle been played? Do you play Ragtime with absolute equal sixteenths? When do you bend and when do you not? This is where you have to keep that circuit going between Performer, Audience and Piece, and as long as the cycle is going, that’s going to be imparted to somebody else. This is what tradition is about! </p>
<p>BD: So does your piece get better and better as it’s performed more and more? </p>
<p>WB: Until people lose the thread, and I’m afraid to say that in many cases with the classical repertory we probably have lost the thread of performance style in many cases. We’re dealing with a kind of torso of what it might have been. </p>
<p>BD: If we’ve lost the thread, should we go and find the thread, or should we just abandon it completely? </p>
<p>Well let’s at least try! Often as not you find it in popular styles. When I was hearing the old archive recordings of Monteverdi operas , which were perfectly deadly dull renderings of what was written down, everything was just people following all the half notes and whole notes, and generally plunking along with this rather pedestrian style because they were playing what THE NOTES said — as Eubie Blake used to call it. I just knew this was wrong. One day I was taken to a coffee house in Florence where a fellow was sitting there improvising a kind of sing-song over the events of the day. He was accompanying himself on the guitar, and I said to myself, “Hoo-ee! This is Monteverdi in recitative!” It was probably way before Monteverdi, and they picked up the style. If you want to find out how the old styles were, look into popular sources. There’s a very interesting record we put out in the Explorer Series when I was working at Nonesuch called Folk Fiddling from Sweden. It’s full of quadruple stops, and it has a wonderfully raw sound about it that can be compared to the Bach Partitas and Sonatas for unaccompanied violin. You see enormous numbers of parallels. If you want to have some sense of what it might sounded like in Bach’s day, listen to that. In other words, the popular sources will continue this kind of relationship, often longer than you’ll find in conservatories. So there are sources, and you can find them. About three or four years ago, The New York Times was despairing, talking about how Charles Ives was over-rated, and everybody was checking their hands about how to play it. These were conservatory musicians trying to get a handle onto Ives. Well, for heaven’s sake, there is the whole Gospel tradition, and the whole popular music traditions that Ives grew up with, and this is very much extant. Go look at that and you’ll have a better idea of how to play Hello, my Baby in the middle of Central Park in the Dark! </p>
<p>BD: And even the marching bands that just go by in his works! </p>
<p>You bet, it’s all there! All you’ve got to do is look at it, and find that part of you that responds to it. Then you can keep that circuit going. Many people are very puritanical about it and don’t know how to bring it off. They try to do it in some sort of prescribed conservatory notion, and they’re missing the whole point of Ives. </p>
<p>BD: Despite all of this, are you optimistic about the future of music, (a) composition, and (b) performance? </p>
<p>In general versus being pessimistic about it? Anybody reasonable has good reason to be pessimistic about anything. We have a terrific number of horrible problems as a planet that we’re not really hurrying towards resolving, so I don’t know why I should be any more optimistic about the future of music and performance than I should be about the future of the world. I feel we’re on a terrible collision course, and we have a very good chance of screwing the whole works up. So why should I be any more optimistic about the future of music? </p>
<p>BD: So you don’t expect your music to last two hundred and fifty or three hundred years? </p>
<p>WB: I don’t know whether my music will last or not. It’s not my business. We’ve really spent too much of our time thinking about this. Probably most of the neuroses of the twentieth century stem from worrying about what’s going to happen to us in the future. I hope that people will understand something as they go by, and I hope that people will respond, and I hope that what I’m doing will become part of that wonderful circuit that Yo-Yo keeps talking about. Then, if it has a certain kind of longevity, fine. I’ve also noticed that longevity for music has nothing to do with current criticism. I’ve looked back into the things that were reviewed by even the very best critics of the past, and much time is spent on people we don’t play at all. </p>
<p>BD: Slonimsky has that wonderful book... [Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time] </p>
<p>WB: Exactly! It’s also where you see all the pieces we do love dearly skewered by these guys. What does live is the thing that causes the performer to get on that circuit again. The performer says, “Hey, I can do something with this,” and then the piece lives. That’s how any kind of longevity is brought about. It has nothing to do with some sort of pantheon of great art that’s put up by any kind of aesthetic. In the end it’s the whole business of making something out of when I play it. There may be lots of wonderful music from the past, and we try very hard to reconstruct the dead styles, so there’s big things that we only have a tiny kind of idea what they might be. I’m talking about much of them in the mediaeval tradition, but if you look carefully, much of these sources are still existent in the popular culture. If you can extrapolate from that some sort of a direct line all the way back, then you might be able to play these works in some kind of way. Many music colleges are beginning to find this to be true, and there are ways of doing it. I worked with a wonderful musician out in Stanford, George Houle, who wanted to show us how a pattern of a Galliard was performed. We went out to the back and we had to dance them, so we played them better. With simple things like you see the connection between that and the previous other kinds of things. It is not necessarily a question of trying to be historically authentic. We can’t be, but we can make something that’s exciting and viable that will make sense to us. Then it’s worth doing. </p>
<p>A number of your works have been recorded, and obviously these performances will transcend at least a few years. Are you pleased with these recordings? </p>
<p>WB: I would say on the whole, yes. I’ve never felt one was really absolutely wrong, and sometimes you find things that come at you that you’ve had no idea of. The Louisville Orchestra recently did three of my orchestral pieces [CD re-issue shown below], and I only heard them play one of them. The other ones they did without ever sending tapes to me, and I was interested to listen to them. At least most times when they record something, they usually send a tape and say, “What do you think about it?” Or, “Maybe there’s a wrong note here and there. Can you help?” I repeatedly asked them to send something, but they never sent a thing, and one day a whole package with the finished record came. I wondered what it was going to be like, but I sat down and was perfectly happy. I would have fixed a couple of tiny ensemble problems and a wrong note here and there, but in the main they played it very well. So what can I say? I’ve been nothing but basically happy. I do feel that there’s a large number of performers who know what I’m after, and seem to play my scores with a certain kind of understanding and expertise. They might even like them! So if that means you have certain time of longevity, then that’s fine. I have no idea how long it will last. It may be that we’re in the process of seeing the last few years of a whole instrumental culture, which might be supplanted by a whole electronic one. </p>
<p>BD: Is that a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing? </p>
<p>WB: I don’t know. I found ways of dealing with electronics in various orchestra pieces whenever it’s practical. We are using a Kurzweil synthesizer, or I should say sampler, in the pit for the Lyric Opera Chicago but you’d hardly know it was there. It’s in a corner where all those xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiels, celestas, pianos, and organs are all on one keyboard. If we have to use all those varied instruments, they would take up half the pit themselves, so I’m able to save a lot of space. With the good quality sampler you can come out with a perfectly realistic thing, and it works very well, particularly in the pit because you’re trying to deal with the saving of space. It allows me a lot of color variations that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. But you have other losses because no electronic keyboard will be able to deal with the variety of a text that real instruments can use. So you have to be very judicious about it. </p>
<p>BD: So you gain and you lose? </p>
<p>WB: You would lose if you played a whole orchestra with a bunch of keyboards, but I imagine many small opera companies and groups could use it. Certainly, we’ve already seen it in the Broadway orchestra, and in orchestras in opera productions where people do resort more and more to keyboards. It has to be tasteful, it has to be judicious, and often as not it’s going to be pretty boring. </p>
<p>BD: Hopefully your material is not boring! </p>
<p>WB: [Laughs] Well, I hope not! It might make people a little angry sometimes, but that’s all right. At least I keep them listening. </p>
<p>BD: One last question. Is composing fun? </p>
<p>WB: It’s the most fun I’ve ever had, except for performing and enjoying my life with my beautiful wife whom I adore! </p>
<p>BD: I hope it continues for a long time. </p>
<p>WB: Thank you very much.</p>
<hr><p>© 1992 Bruce Duffie </p>
<p>Recorded in Chicago on November 5, 1992. Portions were broadcast on WNIB in 1993, and 1998, and on WNUR in 2004. This transcription was made in 2017, and posted at http://www.bruceduffie.com/bolcom.html/ at that time. </p>
<p> </p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4925232
2017-11-08T21:07:19-06:00
2017-11-08T21:16:13-06:00
Bruce Duffie: An interview with William Bolcom & Joan Morris (1986)
<p>This interview with William Bolcom, which took place on June 29,1986, also included the participation of his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. Bruce Duffie says: "As with some other musical couples that I’ve interviewed, on occasion they both responded to my questions together back and forth, and I was perceptive enough not to interrupt!"</p><!-- more -->
<p>They were in Chicago for the Grant Park Music Festival, which was giving performances of his Songs of Innocence and Experience, a more than two-hour setting of poems by William Blake for soloists, choruses, and orchestra, which was premiered in 1984 in Stuttgart, culminating twenty-five years work. </p>
<p>Grant Park is an annual summer festival which takes place outdoors on the lakefront in downtown Chicago, so some of the comments in this first meeting reflect that situation.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> . . . . . . . . . </p>
<p style="text-align: center;"> </p>
<p>Bruce Duffie: I was going to make a separate list of questions for you as composer and as performer, but then I wondered how you separate the two — if at all? </p>
<p>William Bolcom: Absolutely, I don’t. I consider myself a ‘musician’. I’ve always been a ‘musician’. I’ve always thought that’s what I did — I compose and I perform — which, in a way, is a restoration of the earlier non-classified, non-specialized way of doing music. I still feel that I compose, and this is my major activity, what I want to do the most and certainly the one that is the most time consuming. </p>
<p>BD: Yet in many circles you’re more well-known as a performer. </p>
<p>WB: That depends on what kind of world you’re talking about. I’m becoming more known as a composer, but you’re right, of course. Certainly I have a national reputation — if that is what you can call it — with my wife, Joan, which I have enjoyed. That has been from our records together and our performing careers, there’s no question about that. This is not a time where a modern composer is extremely known or revered or followed, particularly in this country, and I’m afraid it’s not that much better in Europe. But that wasn’t the reason we went into performing. We’ve always wanted to do that. One of the things we wanted to do was to perform, and we have indeed performed over the last fourteen years, and had a wonderful time doing it. </p>
<p>BD: As a composer, what do you expect from the public that comes to hear one of your pieces? </p>
<p>WB: A fair hearing. I hope they like it. This is a piece [Songs of Innocence and Experience], has probably something in it for everyone. This is true with the Blake poems that I took them from, and this is an experience which I’ve been producing with the Grant Park people who’ve been wonderful in every way. </p>
<p>BD: Is this going to be recorded? </p>
<p>WB: We’re hoping to, but there’s going to have to be some foundation or other financial support because the total costs they’re estimated to be around to half a million dollars when you count the cost of the recording, the artists’ fees, and all the other things involved in a production of this size. There are 290 people performing here in Grant Park. So we’re trying to raise the money, and of course it will never make a big profit because this is serious music. I’m not Michael Jackson. But it’s still worth doing, and there are many people who are doing something about it. It seems to have been the piece of mine that has had the most response, and at least it elicits the most curiosity for people. </p>
<p>BD: Would you ever be surprised if you record sells as much as Michael Jackson? </p>
<p>WB: [Laughs] Well, I’d be delighted. That means I wouldn’t necessarily have to do some of the things I have to do to make a living! That would be very nice, and I wouldn’t mind it. But I don’t know... whatever happens will happen. One can never deal with these things as any expectancy. It’s not the same thing as, say, putting out a new line nail polish. </p>
<p>BD: If you had all the money that you needed, what would you do — just compose all day? </p>
<p>WB: Probably, but I still would want to perform with my wife. I would miss that audience response. It’s very important to have some kind of one-to-one connection with people. I like that. I like looking at faces. I don’t always want to have the electronic medium between us. In fact, in that way I’m diametrically opposite to Glenn Gould, for example, who didn’t really want to have those people out there. </p>
<p>BD: Is it important, though, for a composer — yourself, or any contemporary composer — to get their pieces recorded? </p>
<p>WB: It’s the only way that they get disseminated in a time when we don’t have an amateur culture to pick up a piece of music and read and try to learn it that way. That’s one of the things the composers of the past could reasonably depend on, so that kept the whole publishing world going. Today it’s a marginal business, and it’s basically really for the delectation of musicians who often as not just Xerox a thing from the library instead of buying new copies. We really don’t make any money from that, but it’s not even that. It’s a question of getting your pieces disseminated. When you can buy a recording, people will because it’s a more natural thing to do, and it presents a fantastic range of possibilities today. It doesn’t necessarily matter whether it’s CD or mono or 78 or 33. Just the fact that you can buy a performance and have it at home is so different from any other time before us that it has changed the whole business, and it’s changed the whole world of music, too. In certain ways it’s made it more passive, and I’m sorry about that. I love the idea of everybody who is somehow involved with a particular art also practicing it. Poets have that, and many people who follow poetry are also themselves poets. But many people who follow music are not in any way involved with doing music. </p>
<p>BD: This brings me to one of my favorite questions. For whom do you write? </p>
<p>I write for myself and I write for everyone else in the world. Realistically I know everyone else in the world is not necessarily going to hear everything or anything that I write, but I hope to reach other humans. That’s the main thing. I never have thought of myself writing for a particular public. In fact, I want to cut across any of those classifications. I’m sorry for all of the classes that people put themselves into. In the end you get boxed in. I want to be a human being at large, and I hope in a strange way that everyone else will pick up that spirit from whatever anybody like me will do. </p>
<p>BD: At whose doorstep can be lay the blame for putting these major divisions between the kinds of performers? </p>
<p>WB: It’s probably the mercantile spirit. As in French, you don’t mix up the dish towels with the napkins. It’s an old saying, and we seem to find the same need to classify. We’ve had that notion, that mentality, for many, many years. It’s the nation of shopkeepers that we are. [With a mock-stern tone] We have to put things in niches and they have to stay there, by God. If they have to move about, then they are suddenly very dangerous and they won’t stay put. That’s the part that’s too bad, because anything that’s really interesting is going to be volatile. So I guess we just have to find out whether we can somehow make other people feel equally antsy about always having to stay in classes. That’s what I’m hoping to see happen. </p>
<p>BD: [With a gentle nudge] So now can we slap the ‘crossover’ label on you??? </p>
<p>WB: [Laughs] I hate that because that would be honoring these classes even more than ever. I’d rather transcend them than be a ‘crossover’ person. My own objection is to all these people talking about ‘fusion’ and ‘crossover’ — assuming that those classifications are watertight and are somehow God-given. I don’t think that’s true. That’s just a hand-over we have put on things, and if we begin to believe in our own nomenclature, that’s too bad. It boxes everything in, and I don’t like that. </p>
<p>* * * * * </p>
<p>BD: Do you perform differently for the microphone than you do for a live audience? </p>
<p>Of course! Everybody does. We try to find a different kind of compromise, however. Just recently we’ve made two live recordings, both of which are on RCA, and we had forty, fifty, sixty people out in front of us. We would record the same song maybe three times, and out of that you have various takes, so they can cut it as they might. You will hear audience response, and I like that. That makes it a do-able human experience in all kinds of ways. It also means that you have a certain kind of ‘momentariness’. Sometimes the way that people record these days — in which you can edit anything in or out or sideways, and so forth — all the imperfections are simply just moved out. It’s okay! I don’t mind recording like that, and for certain pieces it is absolutely right to do things like that. But for other things I like a little looseness. </p>
<p>BD: Has it become too sterile? </p>
<p>WB: I think so. </p>
<p>BD: Does it ever become too perfect? </p>
<p>WB: I think so, yes, and I don’t think we need that. We need the engagement of immediacy of a certain kind of moment with something happening right now, and that’s the thing you can often lose in a recording. </p>
<p>BD: How do the two of you decide which songs you will put into your repertoire and which songs you will not? </p>
<p>Joan Morris: This is why we don’t like to print a program. We like to be responsive, and when we come to a town we find out what the sponsor would like to hear. Maybe someone will tell us at the last minute that they hope we’re going to do such-and-such. Then, at least we know there’s one song someone out there wants to hear. Also, it keeps it fresh for us, and we can put in new material that we’re trying out. Some of the songs we’ve recorded, and it’s always interesting to me to see which ones stay in our repertoire, and others we don’t seem to do much after we’ve recorded them. Some we tend to do quite a lot that really are the classics for us and the audience response is the most rewarding. </p>
<p>WB: And every audience is different. The one thing you’re trying to do is psyche out the difference between one audience and another, so we usually try to go to a place enough in advance — say the day before — to be able to talk to the people who’ve hired us, to get a feeling for the place a little bit. Then we think about it, and as late as we dare we put together our program. In that way, every program is a bit different. Sometimes we will do a lot that seem a little light, but there’ll be certain ways that we will subtly slide it toward the people who you’ve gotten to know a bit. </p>
<p>JM: It also depends on the hall. </p>
<p>WB: Yes! </p>
<p>JM: We just played the Ordway in St. Paul, which is 1,800 seats and has a wonderful sound. But there you do numbers which you want to do in a big space, that really reach to the furthest corner of the audience. Maybe you wouldn’t do ‘The Physician’ [by Cole Porter] because all those words are going so fast. Some of it might get lost in that space. If it’s a more intimate hall, then we characterize the program that way. </p>
<p>WB: This doesn’t preclude the possibility of taking a very large place and turning it into a small place, just by willing it. You can do that. </p>
<p>JM: Oh, that’s fun, too! </p>
<p>BD: So you feed off the audience wherever you are? </p>
<p>WB: Absolutely! </p>
<p>JM: Sure! </p>
<p>WB: We want to look at their faces, if at all possible. We like to see them, and every so often you’ll see somebody out in the audience that [pretends to be excited] goes just like this, so excited and just jumping up and down! It’s like balm to you. You just feel all this terrific energy coming back, and you’re not exhausted. Other times they just sit there like a bunch of potatoes, and it’s very hard to move them. Then when you come out, you’re exhausted. </p>
<p>BD: What about an outdoor audience? </p>
<p>WB: This week we did two performances outside in Grant Park, and it was absolutely lovely. </p>
<p>JM: Even on that rainy day! </p>
<p>WB: On the Friday, just the stalwarts came out in their yellow raincoats, and they sat there and they jumped up and down, and they applauded, and they were just great. I loved them! </p>
<p>JM: [Nodding] Yes, very much so. </p>
<p>BD: Are you constantly looking for new material? </p>
<p>JM: Oh, sure. I’m always interested. Even with all the research and reading I’ve done, there’s always new things you come across — new old things. For instance, a dear friend of Bill’s [Peter Winkler] wrote a revue [Professionally Speaking] that got produced off-Broadway this season, and he showed us a song from this several months back before the show went into production. That song, called Tamara, Queen of the Nile has really enlivened our current program. </p>
<p>WB: In fact, that’s part of our new recording called Lime Jello. That is a song which I wrote for encores, and it really has been fun. We’ve done that encore, Lime Jello, Marshmallow, Cottage Cream Surprise, in halls all over the United States and Europe, and it always gets the same mad response. It’s terrific fun to do, and that became the title of the album because people are always asking when we were going to record this thing. So we finally we did, with a collection of a lot of new cabaret-styled material by many of our friends and other people. Sheldon Harnick has done wonderful things over the years, and we’ve done three or four of his songs, as well as things by Winkler, Leiber & Stoller, and other people who are not as well known for that, like Dick Hyman, who is a wonderful composer as well as an arranger. </p>
<p>BD: So you’re not looking for just new ‘old material’, you’re looking for new ‘new material’? </p>
<p>JM: Yes, that’s right. </p>
<p>WB: As much as anything else, certainly. We tend to look for things that are not as well-travelled. We’ve never had any great desire, for example, for going into Rodgers & Hammerstein because lots and lots of other people are doing that. I don’t see any reason to beg comparison. On the other hand, when you’re talking about something like Gershwin or Cole Porter, which we’re hoping someday to record, it’s a matter of trying to find things that we really like, and not at the same time eschewing standards. Those are great things that are great and well-known because they really do deserve that. </p>
<p>JM: It’s that way with all the greatest songs, even with classical pieces by Schubert or Brahms. They can stand the newest interpretation. Every artist brings their own special thing to it, and I hope that I bring something, at least one little spark of something to every song that maybe nobody’s thought of yet. </p>
<p>BD: Do you ever drop a song by Schubert or Brahms into your recitals? </p>
<p>WB: I have been known to do that. </p>
<p>JM: The year my voice teacher died we did some Brahms in New York in our program... </p>
<p>WB: In her memory. </p>
<p>JM: ...because she had actually played for Brahms when she a girl in Vienna. Once in a while we’ll do some Ives, b </p>
<p>ut, sometimes we get asked to do concert programs. For instance, we’ll do an all-Gershwin program in Pasadena, so there you make it special. Sometimes in Canada they love the old songs. It’s true, you don’t hear those as often as, say, Gershwin or Berlin, but that material is in our purview at the moment. </p>
<p>Right. But we’ve done many anthologies on records. We just came out with a second anthology of Berlin Songs for Nonesuch. The first one was on RCA, and it’s something we like to do. We like to explore composers’ or songwriters’ viewpoints, so we look at everything we can find to see if there’s a whole record in there. We find their face after doing a number of songs. </p>
<p>BD: Why is it that the two of you seem to be the only ones doing this kind of thing? </p>
<p>WB: Oh, I’m not sure that’s true. There are a few others around, and there are other people who are really fine artists who are known for other things, who have also done anthologies. There are some more now... </p>
<p>These things have never completely died, but I know what you mean. There’s not the attention. It’s like ragtime. It takes a while for people to have the distance to look back at it and appreciate it, and understand the role it plays in our history, and that these things shouldn’t be allowed to completely die into oblivion. These are the tunes that are in the consciousness of us all, like ‘Wait ‘till the sun shines, Nellie’. Maybe the youngest kids that haven’t come across it, but it’s just part of our consciousness. It’s what shapes our language and the way we approach life. </p>
<p>BD: Do you want the audience that goes to a Michael Jackson concert to also come to hear your concert? </p>
<p>WB: Why not? </p>
<p>JM: Sure! </p>
<p>WB: It’s not uncommon. We’ll find people out there who are very big on all kinds of music — omnivores — young people who have been fans of the one also like the other. People are cutting across in their tastes a good deal more than they once did, and I think that’s great. </p>
<p>JM: Old people come because, “Oh, I remember that,” and the kids are, “Wow! That’s great.” </p>
<p>WB: Then they’ll come back years later, and they have gotten all those records. That’s when they ask really searching questions about this and that, particularly in places like Canada. They don’t just come back and tell you how much they like the concert; they tell you about their research on a particular person, or they’ll ask whether you know about such-and-such details. Sometimes they’ll be much more on the facts than we are. We forget! [Both laugh] </p>
<p>JM: A man in Interlochen told us a wonderful story about May Irwin one time. We do the ‘Frog Song’ of hers. She also introduced ‘After the ball’, and she was a favorite performer of Mark Twain. So we did one of these songs and he said, “I have to tell you, I lived in one of the buildings she owned on Lexington Avenue! She was one of the few women who saved her money and took a lot of money out of Vaudeville. She had come to visit us after we’d moved in, and was chatting with us. She said, ‘My name won’t mean anything to you, but your parents knew me.’ As she was leaving, she said, ‘Well, boys, there’s only two things to do on a rainy day, and I don’t play cards!’” [Much laughter all around] </p>
<p>* * * * * </p>
<p>BD: In your composing, do you feel that you are part of a line, a lineage of composers? </p>
<p>WB: Oh, gosh, I don’t know. There are certainly composers whose music I respond to, and they range considerably. </p>
<p>JM: Ives maybe? </p>
<p>WB: I would say Ives, but I would say at the same time I feel very strongly connected with people like Gershwin, and Scott Joplin, and my teacher Darius Milhaud, and Alban Berg, and an enormous number of people who I respond to. I don’t know whether there’s any real sense of lineage. We’re not the Viennese tradition where Schoenberg could say that he was part of another tradition. You really have to understand him in that light to understand the music. We have never had a real absolute kind of tradition, but we do have a popular tradition which I’m very interested in and have always cared about, and that’s very much part of the background that we’ve had. One of the things that may make me unusual amongst American serious composers is that I’ve always been interested in incorporating all that, which in a way takes me back to the Classical Period. This is what you’ll find in Haydn. </p>
<p>BD: Do you want your music to last? Do you expect your music to last? </p>
<p>WB: I hope it does. So far, certainly it’s had a certain amount of longevity. I was just talking with one conductor who is going to be doing my Commedia in Brussels. That is an orchestra piece which has been played several hundred times, which is very unusual for a contemporary work. Much of my stuff which has been played gets played and played and played. For example, the performances here of the Songs of Innocence and Experience will be the fourth and fifth performances. For a piece that size that’s very unusual, and there are three more slated at the Brooklyn Academy in November [conducted by Lukas Foss], and there are other people who will be doing it, like the BBC, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Those are not definite and the dates are still not clear, but with the luck this piece has had, they will be done. That’s an unusual thing and it’s very encouraging. </p>
<p>JM: When you were orchestrating all those years, and finishing the piece, you had your doubts. “Am I ever going to see this piece done? It’s so humungous! Is there going to be a group that will really want to take it on?” </p>
<p>WB: Yes! And here more than one group has done it, and all from different venues. That’s what’s interesting. We’ve had a German opera house in Stuttgart, my university in Michigan, and here in a park concert situation. Then Brooklyn Academy of Music will have an entirely different thing because it’s going to be the Brooklyn Philharmonic with the Next Wave Festival, and that’s an entirely different way of doing things. So that’s in itself is very interesting, and very encouraging that it doesn’t have to be done just one way in one situation with one audience and by one kind of house. </p>
<p>BD: So let us broaden the idea even farther. Where’s music going today? </p>
<p>WB: Milhaud had a wonderful answer. He said, “The history of music is the history of the music of the next great man or woman.” I think that’s pretty good. There was no absolute line. The one thing I would never want to do is predict anything, but I will say that I have noticed among younger composers — mine, or from other places — is that they are interested in a more inclusive attitude. I remember when I was their age it was an exclusive time. We had to be ‘atonal’ exclusively. There was a certain kind of attitude. Everybody was sure that tonality was dead. Well, it was not even sick! [Laughter all around] What has happened is that it’s been expanded enormously, more than we ever thought it could be. So we suddenly find ourselves with all this wonderful language you can use, instead of having to say you can only do this or you can only do that— which is a Nineteenth Century phenomenon. That was a period where there were new schools of painting, and new schools of poetry, but in music you had to do just one kind of thing, and say this is what it was. There was a certain canon everybody in the group agreed on, and we always had to say we were solidly against everybody else. We were going to be ourselves and impose our will on everyone else. Occasionally they do win the day for a while, and then that passes. It’s always been like that, and in the meantime, each one has something that they have left for us. Nowadays, all you have to do is simply say this was an exclusive phenomenon rather than an inclusive phenomenon, where you have something new that you can add to this enormous amount of language that we are approving. We can do so many wonderful things now that we couldn’t do a hundred years ago in music. One of our problems has been to box ourselves in with some sort of attitude. </p>
<p>BD: Is this the advice you give to the young composers? </p>
<p>WB: I see composers who try to deny some part of their background. I would say a good half of my students at the University of Michigan are ex-rockers, and there are an awful lot of them in other schools, too. Most of them are trying to just say good-bye to that whole life, which I can understand. It’s very bad with all the drugs and everything else, but at the same time it’s part of their lives. It’s part of their background, and it would be silly for them to deny all that whole big hunk of their lives because there’ll always be tripping over it. I say to them that they’re going to have to come to terms with every part of their life because if they don’t, at some point it will come bang, right up in their face and they won’t be able to deal with it in any realistic way. So what I try to do is find a way for them to integrate their own lives with their own experience, because when they do this, they will end up with something that is truly theirs. </p>
<p>BD: [With amazing foresight, considering the productions yet to come in Chicago!] Have you written an opera? </p>
<p>WB: I’ve written two operas for actors — Dynamite Tonite and Greatshot — with the same librettist, a fellow named Arnold Weinstein, and just now we’re starting on a third one called Casino. </p>
<p>BD: What is an ‘opera for actors’? </p>
<p>WB: It is an opera where actors sing instead of singers sing! That was twenty-some years ago, (in 1961) my gosh! It was called Dynamite Tonite, and won a lot of awards. It kept getting revived, although it never made any kind of success on Broadway. It got to be known as ‘the flop that wouldn’t die’ because the same people would come back and revive it. For several years it became a kind of reunion. All the people would somehow get out of their old jobs, and come back and sing it anyway because in the believed in the work. Today I wouldn’t necessarily have to do that the same exclusive kind of way. </p>
<p>BD: Why do you call them operas? Are they not really Musical Theater? </p>
<p>WB: Because in an opera you sing all the time, and these people sang all the time. They weren’t structured like a musical comedy at all. They were really structured like an opera but they sounded lighter. They were operas in that sense, but the people who sang them were actors. The reason I wanted to use actors instead of the singers — particularly twenty-five years ago — was that in those days, singers almost exclusively trained in what you might call ‘singer-ese’, or as Luciano Berio once put it, ‘British-Italian’, in which you have some sort of an attempt to put in Italian pure vowels and over-emphasize British consonants, which ends up sounding like gibberish. You really can’t understand it at all. It sounds like Esperanto, and I was terribly concerned that somebody understand what’s being sung. This is the kind of thing that was just assumed as a possibility in every musical culture, and everybody accepted it. Today we have gotten so inured to the idea of not being understood that people just decide to simply to go ahead and set words any way, and I think that would be a very academic exercise. I was interested in being understood, so I put up with the roughnesses and occasional mistakes that an actor would have because I wanted the reality of the actor’s presentation. Also, I like the variety of the actors’ voices. I love the fact that everyone sounded like themselves when they sang and talked — if they did have to talk. There wasn’t that big schism between their speaking and their singing voices that you find in so many singers. Today, many singers have decided that it’s time for them to work up their own kind of diction. One of the encouraging things that happened here at Grant Park was that I could understand most of the singing. They used diction that was really American. That was true with the chorus, and really was an attempt for Americans to sing to other Americans. When we do it in England on the BBC, then of course it will be British, and it will be ‘Britishers’ singing to other ‘Britishers’. They’ll be using their accent, which is absolutely legitimate, but I don’t want them to sing as British-Italians. </p>
<p>BD: [To Joan] Do you work terribly hard then at your diction especially in the popular songs? </p>
<p>JM: I’ve always worked on it, but not so much on the diction itself as I take every piece as an acting piece. I take every song apart, put it in my own words and ask, “What is the message? What am I trying to say?” I make sure when I go back to the real words that I’m getting the message over to the people; that they understand the story. How are they going to laugh if they can’t understand the words of a joke, or be touched if they don’t know exactly what you’re describing? I can’t imagine getting up there and not wanting to be understood. I don’t have a voice, just as an instrument, that can knock them dead in the aisles, so I emphasized my strong point, which is to appeal not only as beautiful sound. I use my voice as an instrument. </p>
<p>WB: But your diction is one of the things that people always remark on. </p>
<p>JM: Oh, it’s true, they do, but then I say to them that nobody says Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley has great diction. It’s just taken for granted in popular music. Where did it ever get accepted that when you get up on the stage in opera you don’t have to convince people the same way just because it’s a familiar story? </p>
<p>WB: Which is exactly why I used actors all these years! Now I’m suddenly encouraged by the younger performers more. I can understand them, and that’s a new thing so that the new opera will actually be using both actors and singers. I’m interested in that, too. Just as what happened in the plays, I used an enormous variety of types of voice, and that’s interesting to me. We have this now. We don’t all sound the same. </p>
<p>BD: You’ve done many popular songs by these various composers. Would you ever get involved in a full-length show by any one of them? </p>
<p>It might be a very interesting idea. Certainly, revivals would be interesting. Our friend John McGlinn has been making something of a career reviving older musicals, and has done this all very well. We might do that. There are lots of things we’d like to do, especially when there’s interesting material. We always look at the actual material. If it’s wonderful and we really want to do it, fine, but I don’t just want to do a show just to do a show. It’s got to be a good show. </p>
<p>JM: This August, in Charlemont, MA — at the Mohawk Trail Festival, which we’ve done almost every year for the last ten years — Sheldon Harnick will be composer-in-residence. We’ve gotten to know him a little bit, and we will work on a lot of his material to showcase it. </p>
<p>WB: He composes as well as writes lyrics. He’s a real musician. He played the violin for many years, and was trained as a musician here in Chicago. He got a music degree from Northwestern, so he’s really a local product. He’s a very nice guy, and extremely articulate, and I think he’s the best lyricist around. He’s just marvelous. </p>
<p>JM: In fact, we had three of his songs on our new album, Lime Jello. One is The Boston Beguine, for which he wrote both words and music, and two that he wrote with Jerry Bock. One is called Artificial Flowers from Tenderloin, and one is ‘Just a Map’... </p>
<p>WB: …which was cut… </p>
<p>JM: ...from The Rothschilds. </p>
<p>BD: Do you look for songs that are cut out of town? </p>
<p>JM: Sure. We look for whatever’s good, and often as not we’ll talk to the writers themselves. We will ask, “What do you like that hasn’t been recorded? What would like to have done?” That’ll elicit a whole kind of marvelous response. People are crazy to have things they thought were terrific that got lost. They’d love to have them shown, and we’ve had a lot of fun, for example, with Leiber and Stoller, who are very old friends of mine. One day I walked up to their office and said, “What do you want to have us do that we haven’t seen or heard?”, and one album came out of that. </p>
<p>BD: Thank you for bringing your music to Chicago. </p>
<p>WB: We hope to continue! </p>
<hr><p>© 1986 Bruce Duffie </p>
<p>This conversation was recorded in Chicago on June 29, 1986. A copy of the unedited audio was placed in the Archive of Contemporary Music at Northwestern University. This transcription was made in 2017, and posted at <a contents="http://www.bruceduffie.com/bolcom.html" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.bruceduffie.com/bolcom.html" target="_blank">http://www.bruceduffie.com/bolcom.html</a> at that time.</p>
<p>Award winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001. His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4710255
2017-05-15T23:53:28-05:00
2017-05-15T23:53:52-05:00
Chicago Tribune: Lucrezia "draws a lively staging from Chicago Fringe Opera"
<p>"Tangos, fandangos, waltzes, even snatches of ragtime and jazz pepper Bolcom's musical pastiche" </p><!-- more -->
<p><br><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/07a06cafdff1433ebc8c1944d72233b426853b96/original/lucrezia-01-jpg-20170507.jpg?1494908992" class="size_l justify_center border_" /></p>
<p>(May 7, 2017) -- Critic John von Rhein writes: ...Bolcom's gifts as a composer for the lyric stage are readily apparent regardless of the stylistic nests he raids. "Lucrezia," set in 19th-century Spain, is a sly contemporary take on the popular Spanish music theater tradition known as zarzuela. Tangos, fandangos, waltzes, even snatches of ragtime and jazz pepper Bolcom's musical pastiche, accompanied by piano four hands and punctuating Campbell's pun-laced libretto. Silly sophistication, if you will, and no less enjoyable for it.... </p>
<p>...Bolcom's immense skills as a songwriter bestriding the classical and popular realms are on winning display in the cabaret prelude to the show. </p>
<p><a contents="Read the whole review here." data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/ct-fringe-opera-lucrezia-review-ent-0508-20170507-column.html" target="_blank">Read the whole review here.</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4666028
2017-03-26T21:10:00-05:00
2017-04-10T21:11:04-05:00
Charleston Gazette-Mail: A remarkable concert of firsts by the Delphi Piano Trio
<p>Bolcom's "Piano Trio (2014, written for the Delphi) moved fluidly among modernist styles with massive dark textures in the opening of the piece to Gershwin-like bluesy harmony at the start of the slow movement."</p><!-- more -->
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/1ad15f9b220d96c0417a4bc7fc269435a3481f25/medium/ar-170329645.jpg?1491876614" class="size_m justify_right border_" />Review by David Williams <br>March 26, 2017<br><br>The Delphi Piano Trio made it a night of firsts in its concert for the Charleston Chamber Music Society Saturday night at Christ Church United Methodist. The San Francisco-based ensemble played the first piano trios by Beethoven, William Bolcom and Felix Mendelssohn. Each came from a different part of a composer’s career...</p>
<p>...The adage is “write what you know.” The American composer William Bolcom’s career has spanned the creation of operas, string quartets, symphonies and concertos along with a massive two-hour-long setting of poetry by William Blake for orchestra, jazz band, rock band, solo singers and choirs. Plus he was a leader in the ragtime renaissance of the 1970s and has been a lifelong champion of American popular song of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. </p>
<p>So, it is no surprise that his Piano Trio (2014, written for the Delphi) moved fluidly among modernist styles with massive dark textures in the opening of the piece to Gershwin-like bluesy harmony at the start of the slow movement. </p>
<p>That is not to say the work isn’t strikingly original. Indeed, the slow movement’s sighing harmonies and deftly wandering melodies almost sounded like a jazzy Alban Berg. And who would think of that? </p>
<p>The finale started full of machine-like clatter in the keyboard but with curving melodies in the strings. Another of Bolcom’s massive harmonic strokes wiped that away, leading to a quiet conclusion like ripples in a pond dissipating after a big rock was chucked in. The Delphi played the piece with authority. </p>
<p>- See more at: <a contents="http://www.wvgazettemail.com/ae-reviews/20170326/review-a-remarkable-concert-of-firsts-by-the-delphi-piano-trio#sthash.MPvispHO.dpuf" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.wvgazettemail.com/ae-reviews/20170326/review-a-remarkable-concert-of-firsts-by-the-delphi-piano-trio#sthash.MPvispHO.dpuf" target="_blank">http://www.wvgazettemail.com/ae-reviews/20170326/review-a-remarkable-concert-of-firsts-by-the-delphi-piano-trio#sthash.MPvispHO.dpuf</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4235394
2016-06-17T11:37:44-05:00
2016-06-17T11:37:44-05:00
Trombone Concerto receives warm reception in NYC
<p>The New York Times and New York Classical Review praised the world premiere of William Bolcom’s Trombone Concerto, featuring the Philharmonic’s principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi.</p><!-- more -->
<p><a contents="Review: NY Phil Biennial’s Ambitious Wrap-Up, From Boulez to Bolcom&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/arts/music/review-ny-phil-biennials-ambitious-wrap-up-from-boulez-to-bolcom.html" target="_blank">Review: NY Phil Biennial’s Ambitious Wrap-Up, From Boulez to Bolcom </a><br>Anthony Tommasini, June 12, 2016</p>
<p>…the mood was festive for a program offering a look at what’s going on with American concertos these days. It began with the premiere of William Bolcom’s Trombone Concerto, featuring the Philharmonic’s formidable principal trombonist, Joseph Alessi. The premiere coincided with the 45th annual International Trombone Festival at the Juilliard School. Speaking from the stage, Mr. Bolcom asked the trombonists in attendance to stand up. What looked like many dozens did.<br> </p>
<p><a contents="Two American concertos receive strong advocacy at Philharmonic Biennial&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://newyorkclassicalreview.com/2016/06/two-american-concertos-given-strong-advocacy-at-philharmonic-biennial/" target="_blank">Two American concertos receive strong advocacy at Philharmonic Biennial </a><br>George Grella, June 11, 2016<br><br>…Bolcom is a fine composer, with music that provides classical sophistication and concert-hall structure to the Great American Songbook, jazz, and blues. His Trombone Concerto—co-commissioned by the Philharmonic—is a prime example. In three movements, the piece nods at Beethoven and Renaissance vocal music in the first movement. Titled “Quasi una fantasia,” it is full of modal counterpoint and chorales. The middle movement has a blues in 6/8 time and concludes with some impressive orchestral jazz.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4089850
2016-03-15T21:29:06-05:00
2016-03-15T21:29:52-05:00
William Bolcom's Compositions for Solo Harpsichord
<p>Larry Palmer writes in the March 2016 issue of <em>The Diapason</em> on Bolcom's works for solo harpsichord, including L<em>e Fantome du Clavecin</em> and <em>The Vicarage Garden</em>.</p><!-- more -->
<p>"The path to knowledge is oft-times a roundabout one! Preparing to write an essay on harpsichord music of the modern revival period, I decided to solicit lists from this repertoire from colleagues who actually interact with it, either as performers, historians, or musically astute listeners. This exercise has produced, thus far, a basic reaffirmation for the canon of well-known works, occasionally augmented by a complete surprise. Thus is was when Britain’s Jane Clark included among her choices an American solo piece totally unknown to me: William Bolcom’s <em>Le Fantome du Clavecin</em>, composed in 2005… Bolcom’s “Ordre,” comprising nine movements presents a creditable suggestion of what Francois Courperin might sound like had he been born in the late 20th or early 21st century..."<br><br><a contents="Read the full story (download PDF)" data-link-label="diapason-march-2016.pdf" data-link-type="file" href="/files/233978/diapason-march-2016.pdf" target="_blank">Read the full story (download PDF)</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4086212
2016-03-13T18:06:11-05:00
2017-01-16T08:30:13-06:00
CD Review: Canciones de Lorca, Prometheus
<p>On <a contents="www.voix-des-arts.com" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.voix-des-arts.com">www.voix-des-arts.com</a>, critic Joseph Newsome names new Bolcom CD the Best New Music Recording of 2015.</p><!-- more -->
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/7e7b1f404743ea981b71e19378ec0f9501375481/small/canciones.jpg?1453688583" class="size_s justify_right border_" />Excerpt: "<em>Canciones de Lorca </em>and P<em>rometheus</em>, both recorded by NAXOS in performance in Costa Mesa, California ... [are paired] on a most welcome release in the label’s American Classics series. Created under very different circumstances, these works share an ethos anchored by the assertion that, in many aspects of humanity, the impulse to create is far stronger than the will to destroy. Bolcom’s gift for writing for voices, whether individual voices in Lieder or groups of voices in works for the stage, is a vital component of the composer’s own voice, and NAXOS’s recording of poignant, persuasive performances of Canciones de Lorca andPrometheus is a gift to listeners who appreciate Bolcom’s musical ingenuity and the lessons it offers in the art of binding of wounds and healing of scars with song."<br><br><strong>Read the complete review: <a contents="http://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/12/best-new-music-recording-of-2015.html" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/12/best-new-music-recording-of-2015.html" target="_blank">http://www.voix-des-arts.com/2015/12/best-new-music-recording-of-2015.html</a></strong></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4072160
2016-03-03T21:28:58-06:00
2017-01-16T08:30:13-06:00
Radio GUYLIVE: William Bolcom in Linz
<p>Guy Livingston talks with conductor Dennis Russell Davies, publisher Evan Hause, and Bill Bolcom himself about McTeague. Is this tragic opera Dadaist? Or a darker version of Broadway? Or a new genre? </p><!-- more -->
<p><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/ac4e72e25ecfba0eb2cc07a72979364289056590/original/19.jpg?0" class="size_l justify_center border_" />Listen to the story on American Highways online: <a contents="http://guylivingston.com/radio/william-bolcom-in-linz/" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://guylivingston.com/radio/william-bolcom-in-linz/" target="_blank">http://guylivingston.com/radio/william-bolcom-in-linz/</a></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005315
2016-03-03T21:27:32-06:00
2016-03-03T21:27:32-06:00
The Jack Price Radio Show
<p><strong>Interview June 10, 2014 </strong><em><strong>-</strong></em> Bill discusses the creative or compositional process from beginning to end with a few stories in between! He also mentions current and upcoming projects including the Grant Park Festival.</p><!-- more --><br><br><br><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" scrolling="no" src="http://www.pricerubin.com/classical/scripts/radio/getRadioEmbed.php?summarynumber=613&detailnumber=2&showdescription=1&detailtitle=Archive&numdaysdelay=10&showid=242" width="450"></iframe>
<p><em>Each weekday at Noon Eastern Jack Price interviews a variety of guests from influential decision-makers and music directors to some of the most-accomplished concert artists on the scene today. Jack also explores the world of concert management offering insightful commentary on the Performing Arts Industry. </em></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005313
2016-03-03T21:27:04-06:00
2017-01-16T08:30:13-06:00
William Bolcom: Parcours d'une œuvre
<p><strong>An Interview in Two Parts - France Musique</strong></p>
<p>On March 13, 2014 William Bolcom was interviewed by one of France's leading music critics, Renaud Machart, in the studio of France Musique in Paris. </p><!-- more -->
<p><a contents="Read the story online and listen to the first part of the interview&nbsp;here.&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-matin-des-musiciens-du-jeudi/2013-2014/william-bolcom-parcours-d-une-oeuvre-1-03-13-2014-11-00" target="_blank"><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/b631221adb0a0c325394396d5aada17c10e599a0/medium/tn640-image2408.jpg?1453687653" class="size_m justify_left border_" />Read the story online and listen to the first part of the interview here. </a><br><a contents="Read the story online and listen to the second part of the interview&nbsp;here.&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-matin-des-musiciens-du-jeudi/2013-2014/william-bolcom-parcours-d-une-oeuvre-2-03-27-2014-11-00">Read the story online and listen to the second part of the interview here. </a></p>
<p><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> </p>
<hr><p><strong><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/71d8c2fb4303a19896bdfc12462f403d335e4826/medium/tn640-image2407.jpg?1453687646" class="size_m justify_left border_" />Concert privé avec le pianiste et compositeur William Bolcom et la soprano Joan Morris - 42E Street </strong><br><br>On April 27, 2014, Bill Bolcom & Joan Morris were in the studio for interviews and a concert of Bill's Cabaret Songs with Laurent Valiere and a group of musicians including Rayanne Dupuis (soprano), Nigel Smith (baritone), David Levi (piano), Guy Livingston (piano) as well as Bill and Joan themselves. </p>
<p>Read the story, listen to the broadcast and see photos online at <a contents="France Musique" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/42e-rue/2013-2014/concert-prive-avec-le-pianiste-et-compositeur-william-bolcom-et-la-soprano-joan-morris-04-27-2014-11" target="_blank">France Musique</a>. </p>
<p>You can also <a contents="subscribe to the&nbsp;podcast" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/42e-rue/2013-2014/concert-prive-avec-le-pianiste-et-compositeur-william-bolcom-et-la-soprano-joan-morris-04-27-2014-11#les-podcasts" target="_blank">subscribe to the podcast</a> to listen to the interview and concert.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005290
2016-03-03T21:26:52-06:00
2016-03-03T21:30:29-06:00
Confessions of a non-organist
<p><strong>Eastman School of Music, Rochester, New York, September 27, 2013 </strong><br><br><em>Speech given at the EROI (Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative) Festival</em></p>
<p>I’ll bet I am one of a very small percentage of non-organists in this room, if not the only one. Having known and worked with organists for a long time, and even having once been invited to a Calgary convention to judge organ playing, I feel like a welcome guest among you. Organists constitute a large and, at least in my experience, collegial group. </p><!-- more -->
<p>Marilyn Mason, who has commissioned several works of mine – her career-long habit with many living composers – always gets my complimentary copies of American Organist, a magazine very definitely to-the-trade, to give her students as she’d requested me to do. (I doubt any magazine oriented toward popular consumption would have the radical policy of only showing organ installations on its covers – not even one half-dressed babe in the whole magazine! Though Marilyn’s retiring after a record 66-year teaching career, I’ll still give myAmerican Organists to her to distribute.) </p>
<p>I’ve written a fair amount of organ music, especially for a non-organist. My wonderful publisher for many years, Bernard Kalban of Marks Music, told me that music publishers love organists because they buy music. (The only other really lucrative category for publishers is band music.) Church organists tell me they buy a lot of music because of the allotment in the church budget for it will shrink if they don’t spend it all each year; evidently this is still true today even with budget cuts everywhere, and it must have been partly because of such budgets that I’m fairly sure that all of my organ music, most of which was written thirty years or so ago, has seen print. </p>
<p>It wasn’t my publisher however who got me to write for the king of instruments, nor was it from any special interest in organ on my part. Composers write usually most often because some musician wants a new piece, and despite that lovely publication allotment that allows organists to buy our stuff, even organists have to scrape together somebody’s money to pay for that piece – so it must be mostly out of interest from organists that we composers get commissions, and for that my confraternity thanks you! </p>
<p>Band – the other growth area in new-music publishing – is also hungry for new pieces. In the last few years there has been in my estimation a real uptick in quality of new works for band, which is very likely because composers, outside the small parish of exclusively band composers, increasingly appreciate band people’s actually spending a long time learning and rehearsing our new pieces. </p>
<p>Contrast for example the condescending tendency of many orchestras to ask for short pieces not more than ten minutes in length (the maverick Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer was once asked for one, which of course he titled “Not More Than Ten Minutes in Length”). These commissions often come because a particular grant an orchestra needs to function has a stipulation requiring that body to fund and perform a new commission. A ten minutes’ piece presumably won’t take a lot of rehearsal time, and it very likely will be placed at the beginning of a concert when knowledgeable concertgoers know they can miss it if they show up ten minutes late. The composer will have to be thankful if the new piece gets any more than two quick orchestra rehearsals plus a dress. No composer wants a scrappy performance, so to avoid this composers have been learning how to write one-rehearsal-friendly concert openers. Rhythmic squareness, many repeat bars, musical content that can be grasped in first reading by players, all this has created a good deal of new music stunningly devoid of substance. Composers must be cynically aware of the situation – but who can blame them? </p>
<p>And unless it’s the rare pianist who specializes in literature of our time and wants a piece, new piano commissions are exceedingly rare – pianists by and large are preoccupied with an enormously satisfying circa-200-year-old repertoire, which doesn’t leave much room for us youngsters to snuggle into. There are exceptions among other musicians: I find singers are much more eager for new pieces than most pianists, or even most instrumentalists. (It is worth noting that usually a singer wanting a new piece is female – I would guess a ratio of about three- or four-to-one to male-singer requests – and I ascribe that phenomenon to my observation that women are more fearless.) </p>
<p>I’m sorry to have to say that, based on my experience, there has not seemed to have been a correspondingly healthy uptick in the quality of church music versus that of the band repertoire. One of the most dismal contests I ever had to review scores for in my lifetime was when the American Guild of Organists asked me about a dozen years ago to look at 100 new anthems. Every submission seemed to my ears and eyes exactly the same; I often could not have told one composer from another. (Hasn’t anyone told that crew of anthem composers that sort of bland quartal harmony went out of style after World War II? No churchly chord exists evidently without the tonal deflavorant of the obligatory fourth or second replacing the third in a triad, equivocating the harmony to the point of innocuousness; a similar anodyne harmonic idiom is found in music for news programs.) </p>
<p>Recently my wife and I attended the funeral of a dear friend, featuring the current new-age-though-Catholic church music in hymns and voluntaries. We were appalled by the dreariness of this music, especially the cringing attempts at bogus folksiness that pass for musical worship these days. (Thankfully no one played guitar.) It might be that the 19th-century pope who banned most church music past Palestrina had a cramping effect on music of all Christian denominations. However I must also admit that my deep love of even Mendelssohn begins to fade when I get to the two big oratorios, written decades earlier than the pope’s edict, that sprang from Mendelssohn’s adopted Protestant stance. My relative lack of affection for these indisputably great works may come mostly from the fact that they inspired so much moldy kitsch from lesser composers of his time and afterward. (Maybe inspired religious music is less possible to achieve today, despite efforts by Stravinsky, Penderecki and others; I am one, for example, who finds Mahler’s Eighth the weakest of his symphonies, hobbled by his superhuman, almost desperate effort to become a good Catholic. On the other hand Verdi’s superb Requiem, the kind of work that a pope of his time might ban from church, is really an opera about death; its rude and forthright vitality compares to that of the great religious music of 150 years before and maybe to nothing between that time and Verdi’s – though I adore Berlioz’s requiem too.) </p>
<p>I doubt I’ll be asked to contribute to that moribund catalogue of current religious music, especially if the sort of thing I’ve been hearing is what’s wanted. Still I’d have to say I was lucky to have had a nice heavy run of organ commissions for quite a number of years – the 1970s through the 80s – when I had the privilege of writing several landmark (for me) works for one of the 20th century’s incontestably great composer-organists, William Albright. My first piece for him was Black Host of 1967, the most fearless stylistic collage I’d done till then, which subject is the Black Mass. (Fitting such a blasphemous work, I admit to stealing a lot of its ideas and atmosphere from Bill’s own virtuoso works in writing it.) Albright’s superb recording of Black Host on Nonesuch, with his own Organbook II on the B side, is probably out of print by now, but it helped both our careers to a great extent; I’ve heard several subsequent renderings of my piece, all of them good, but none to me surpass nor equal Bill’s. (Black Host even got around the British rock scene a bit; I gave a copy to Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters who I’m told, passed it on to the newly-formed Black Sabbath group, and there are those who tell me they detect Black Host’s influence on their work.) </p>
<p>Following that commission came two requests from Bill which resulted in the otherworldly and pagan Mysteries. The virtuoso extravaganza Hydraulis was inspired by the Greco-Roman water-powered organ of the sinful Roman Empire found at the Circus Maximus and Colosseum, in which I tried to imagine music to feed Christians to the lions by. All this irreligious music was naturally performed in churches, because that is largely where organs are found; no-one involved in these churches ever seems to have minded. Starting with the Unitarian church in Ann Arbor where he was organist, Bill and I also violated many sacred halls of worship in the the late sixties and seventies with our joint ragtime concerts on piano. </p>
<p>After Bill Albright all my subsequent requests were from others. Among these, the American Guild of Organists commissioned the first trio of Gospel Preludes, an Emory University faculty member commissioned three, and Marilyn Mason asked for six.* Though the tunes in the Preludes come from both black and white Protestant American churches, what I do with them puts them outside the category of religious music – they belong clearly to the concert world. </p>
<p>My most recent organ commission, also from the AGO – Borborygm, which is a collage of bits and pieces of unfinished works Bill left at his death which I put together – closes the circle of Albright-inspired work. (I have a bone to pick with my publisher who insists on listing this fruitcake of Albrightiana as my own work; sadly, if you want Borborygm you have to order it from my catalogue.) After many years of not writing anything of my own for organ, I’m currently working on a Fantasia dachiesa for the organist Douglas Reed and the Canadian Brass, due early next year; it is now in the stage of making revisions. (Doug is currently recording the complete organ works of William Albright, playing them superbly.) </p>
<p>I freely and proudly admit Bill’s example as the progenitor of my own organ catalogue. I have not had a similar inspiration to write organ music for a long time, though I recently enjoyed writing Four Preludes on Jewish Melodies, simpler music than the Gospel Preludes andwritten to celebrate the refurbishment of a 19th-century Urban organ at the spectacular Cincinnati synagogue where the famed Rabbi Wise, founder of Reform Judaism, officiated. </p>
<p>I played my beloved father away with Abide with Me in 1970. Dad’s funeral took place at our family’s small English-Gothic Episcopal church in Everett, Washington; the pipe organ there was a smallish Odell, which I understand from organists to have been a commercial brand and not an artisan creation like a Casavant or a Holtkamp. During my undergraduate years at the University of Washington, one of my support jobs was playing services at that church. (The retiring organist there gave me a few lessons using Alexander McCurdy’s manual; when I played organ once for Bill showing him the heel-and-toe pedal technique I’d learned from McCurdy, Bill’s derisive laugh told me this style had been long obsolete.) </p>
<p>Perhaps the constant dialogue between the sacred and profane in my music partly derives from the fact that a good number of Sunday morning services at Everett’s Trinity Episcopal followed previous nights in Seattle playing piano at the Rivoli Burlesque or for the female impersonators’ club on Fourth Avenue, or maybe a frat stag party; I would then take a 2 a.m. Greyhound bus to Everett (about an hour away), grab a nap, and be at church for 6 a.m. mass. After services I would retire to my dorm in Seattle for an intense short sleep before going on to my job as night operator in a nearby hotel. </p>
<p>The only thing I wrote for that little Odell organ would be the Abide with Me chorale prelude for my father’s service a dozen years after my organ job. (The reason there is a baker’s dozen of Gospel Preludes is because the very earliest organ piece I remember writing, that simple chorale prelude, was added as a “bonus” by my publisher to the third group of Preludes.). That hometown-church gig constitutes the sum total of my organ playing for hire (someone else actually prepared the choir). Playing that organ in my college years was just that, a gig; my scholarship at U-W only covered my tuition and I had to pay for my dorm fees, clothes, and everything else by my own earnings. Had it not been for Bill I doubt I would have written much for organ at all in my long career. I certainly do not have the deep knowledge of organ literature any of you presumably has, although I auralized a good deal of Bach, Buxtehude, and other masters in our university library in Seattle and am certainly aware of a good deal of other organ music. And I did studyesthétique musicale with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire, a fascinating 12 hours a week of analysis, for four months before the American draft called me home in February 1961. (By the way, out of the blue came a phone call once I was back in New York City; Stanford offered me a doctorate and a deferment.) </p>
<p>As a non-organist I am usually in deep need of hands-on revisions by organists whenever I’m asked for a piece. Also, unlike pianos or violins or pretty much any other instrument I know, organs vary a great deal in makeup from one to another. I’d written Black Host with the University of Michigan’s enormous Aeolian-Skinner in Hill Auditorium in mind. (Which reminds me that, when Bill was to give a concert in Montreal playing that piece, we asked my friend the Canadian pianist-composer Bruce Mather to scope out an instrument for an upcoming recital. Like me Bruce knows next to nothing about organs and, because he liked its sound, chose a Baroque-style Beckerath for the concert which of course doesn’t have all the pistons and other bells and whistles a romantic organ would have. At the performance Bruce on one side of the manuals and I on the other became pistons ourselves, pulling and pushing in stops according to Bill’s ground plan; despite much amusement on Bill’s part at our mistakes we evidently got through it okay.) </p>
<p>I’ve usually had to ask any commissioning organist to work out registrations for publications for and with me, both of us knowing that players will have to adjust to whatever instrument they land on in touring. Any organist will have to work out compromises when registering for a particular organ, and it would be wise for that person to write down a final registration once it’s worked out for a performance, as I’m sure all of you are aware. Not doing so invites disaster: I remember the premiere of my organ-and-orchestra piece Humoresk, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and one of my works featured during this conference, where the organist in question had carefully worked out the registration for the Alice Tully Hall organ at rehearsal but didn’t write it down, having no idea that the morning before our Sunday-afternoon concert the hall would used for a church service. That organist would of course change the registration. Imagine the panic the poor soloist felt sitting down to play with the orchestra, finding all his work lost and having to dream up a whole new registration on the spot with audience and orchestra impatiently waiting! I hope he learned his lesson. </p>
<p>I’ll close with a fond memory. My late uncle, who owned several movie theaters, was a non-musician but had a degree from MIT and a thirst for things mechanical. In one of his theaters in the small Washington town of Mount Vernon was an elaborate 1920s theater organ he was restoring just for his amusement; it has since become a stop for touring theater organists possessing all the delightful horses’ hooves, train whistles, xylophone and piano played through the manuals and so forth that any silent-movie organist could want. Uncle Elden had just finished work on it when I visited him, and I may have been the first to play around with the restored monster, spending the whole day trying out every sound with great delight. </p>
<p>I’m sorry I have never got around to write for such an organ. Theater organs in this essentially Protestant-based culture are nearly the only ones in the US beside those in sports stadiums (the closest thing we have to the ancient hydraulis) that aren’t in churches. I am very much a secular humanist, sharing Spinoza’s God with Albert Einstein, so I can’t help wondering what a non-religious organ literature might have sounded like if more organs existed outside churches. Evidently we shall never know. Maybe the solution to encouraging such literature might be to invite a temporary deconsecration of religious spaces while non-religious music like most of mine is played – but this probably won’t be necessary anymore as I guess this sort of concert is what seems to be happening in churches all the time out of sheer necessity. This requires a concertgoer to forget, or try to forget, the fact of being in church. </p>
<p>Even a believer like me in Deus sive natura – God as equivalent to Nature as Spinoza held, not God as some outside agency – cannot deny the transcendent godly power of the music of a Bach or a Schütz or a Messiaen, so full of deep religious feeling. I cannot claim anything analogous to such music even in my Gospel Preludes probably because I had too much wicked fun writing them, which is in our Puritan culture a no-no. Never mind: I had a wonderful dalliance for a number of years with the king of instruments, and I thank you profoundly here in this room for taking the trouble to continue to perform my organ music whenever the mood or occasion might strike you. </p>
<p>WILLIAM BOLCOM </p>
<p>---------------------- </p>
<p>*The reason there is a baker’s dozen of Gospel Preludes is because the very earliest organ piece I remember writing, a simple chorale prelude on Abide with Me which I wrote to play at my father’s funeral in 1970, was added as a “bonus” by my publisher to the third group of Gospel Preludes.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005292
2016-03-03T21:26:43-06:00
2016-03-03T21:26:43-06:00
The Future of The Orchestra
<p>by William Bolcom <br>August 2013 </p>
<p>It is well known that small audiences are commonplace nowadays in orchestral concerts. It’s pleasant to talk about outreach programs as possible solutions to audience indifference, but one of the most used outreach efforts in the last several decades was the increase in “pops” programs, which have rarely reaped the hoped-for financial benefits (and were tough on orchestral morale). Something more fundamental to the orchestra’s existence needs to be addressed. We need not only to rethink the orchestra’s position in society; it might be a good time to rethink the makeup of the orchestra itself. </p><!-- more -->
<p>There is a landmark moment in which the evolution of the orchestra was brought to a standstill. In the early 20th century, many parties were interested in including the saxophone in the orchestral ensemble as a permanent member; Cecil Forsyth’s landmark 1914 book “Orchestration” opined that the saxophone would form an effective bridge between the brass and woodwinds. I think, however, that the instrument’s humble beginnings in ensembles – saxophones were notable in French military orchestres d’harmonie, and they were becoming a growing presence in lower-rung jazz ensembles (in New Orleans pawnshops, saxes were much cheaper than clarinets) – had much to do with the disdain regular symphony players had toward saxophonists in the 1910s. This was still manifestly true as late as 1984 when, for the premiere of my “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” in Stuttgart, the two young saxophonists the orchestration calls for stepped gingerly into rehearsal for the first time, in much less well-fitting jackets than the orchestra musicians. I shall never forget the sneer that rose unmistakably from the German opera orchestra, which insisted on putting glass partitions between the two hapless youngsters and the rest of the players – which were kept there for the piece’s two performances. </p>
<p>From what I understand, similarly prejudiced orchestra players, conductors, and symphony board members may have pressured the AFM around 1913 to help codify the disposition of the orchestra (three flutes and the like), with the unspoken proviso of “No Saxophones!” About then, other instruments like saxhorns and sarrusophones lost any foothold in the orchestra – though saxhorn parts exist in Richard Strauss’s “Till Eulenspiegel” and as late as Darius Milhaud’s 1923 “Oresteia” – but the real push by standard musicians was evidently to keep the saxophone out. </p>
<p>This closed the door on not only a timbre, but also an important developing instrumental culture. It had a chilling effect in the U.S. musically, and would turn out to be a full stop (excepting the expansion of percussion and the intermittent addition of variety instruments) to the constant evolution of the ensemble up to that time. That freezing of the orchestral ensemble has had the effect that today’s orchestra – not only in the U.S. but practically everywhere else – is a Collegium Musicum of the World War I period, stopping essentially with Mahler in development. The result is that a huge pool of virtuosity – involving currently-banished instruments composers could have helped utilize and add to the ensemble (as we can imagine Mahler would have had he lived) – has been snubbed, and thus impossible to integrate into the orchestra as had happened until then in the orchestra’s existence. </p>
<p>We composers are now writing for an antique ensemble when we write for the orchestra. To add to our isolation, there is a standoff now between popular and art music more pronounced than any time I can remember in my 75 years, inhibiting the flow between the two which had been the case till the current schism – and that may also relate to that fateful decision to exclude the saxophone in the 1910s. (It would eventually mean that the coming electric-instrument revolution would have little or no influence on the ensemble’s makeup – although it is perfectly possible to mix electric and acoustic instruments in concert, which happens all the time today.) This exclusivity goes against the vernacular part of the orchestra’s history, made up as it is of violins (the lowly street version of the aristocratic viol), horns (brought indoors from the hunt), and noisy open-air shawms and sackbuts (refined into oboes and trombones), just for a few examples. Two needs – improved instruments and virtuoso instrumentalists – had to be met for inclusion in the symphonic ensemble; the saxophone was ready. Its exclusion was a political act, which would contribute to the orchestra’s being frozen in time. </p>
<p>I say this with a certain regret: I love writing for the traditional, unmodernized orchestra, a miraculous instrument even as is – but. And there are numerous “buts” from the composer’s point of view, including shrinking rehearsal time for one bitter example. But – equally serious – a comparison of orchestral programming today, against say the Boston Symphony’s of the 1910-1920 period, shows that, even with recent composerships-in-residence and the like, recent orchestral programming is sparse for new music; this is of course a continuation of a tendency beginning in the late 19th century toward older and older music in programming across the board. But orchestras now are particularly lax even compared to a short hundred years ago in presenting new works. It may be that the 1890s orchestra fits the 2013 sensibility less and less, especially for a number of young composers. </p>
<p>Commissions from orchestras often include strictures like ten-minute time limits and banning the use of non-standard instrumentation. The attitude behind these stipulations all too often relegates a new work’s premiere to definite second-class status against tried-and-true program fare. (Yes, there are exceptions. But let’s admit these are exceptions.) </p>
<p>When there is insufficient rehearsal time for a new orchestral piece (as is the usual case), the resulting performance is all too often scrappy and superficial, almost a public sight-reading – no wonder a new piece is shoved aside quickly! – and the standard works on the program can also seem tired and overworked because there wasn’t sufficient rehearsal time to delve deeply enough to rediscover these recognized masterpieces either. </p>
<p>Subsequent performances of new works after a premiere are rare, often because there is not enough foundational support nor critical interest in a second or third reading (which might even be a vast improvement over the debut: think of the number of beloved masterworks that misfired at the first performance, and remember that we have them in the repertory because of those second chances). </p>
<p>We need to rethink the ensemble of the orchestra. Its traditional function as the microcosm of the musical world is no longer an accurate description. It will take more than additional money to save the notion of the orchestra, and we union members, composers, orchestral players, managements, music schools and conservatories need to think in concerted dialogue if we want the ensemble to flourish.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005074
2016-03-03T21:26:28-06:00
2017-01-16T08:30:12-06:00
An Interview With William Bolcom: Serendipity
<p><strong>by Georgia Rowe, San Francisco Classical Voice </strong><br>November 17, 2009 </p>
<p>William Bolcom has always made his own way. Throughout his career, which has produced symphonies, operas, chamber pieces, and piano and vocal works, the Seattle-born, Michigan-based composer has often rejected the prevailing notions of what “serious” music should include. </p>
<p>He was among the first to revive the piano rag form, and with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, has explored the American song repertoire in concert and recordings for over 35 years. Bolcom, who won multiple Grammy Awards for his setting of William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Twelve New Études for piano. At 71, he continues to compose. This week, the New Century Chamber Orchestra will perform his Three Rags and Serenata Notturna. Later this season, the ensemble will premiere his newest work, Romanza. I spoke to him by phone in Ann Arbor, Michigan. </p><!-- more -->
<p><strong><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/14ccb8832a3f1e869caf811bebd8db549ee9e3f6/medium/logo.jpg?1453670928" class="size_m justify_left border_" />You are the New Century’s featured composer this season, and the group will be playing two of your works on this month’s program. What can you tell us about them? </strong></p>
<p>They’re both kind of sweet and accessible — not my thorny style at all. They’re pretty easy to swallow. I don’t know what’s happened the last few years; I find I’m getting purer harmonically. I do have an extended tonality, but it’s definitely kind of particular. I wouldn’t say it’s atonal, just a little veiled sometimes. The Serenata Notturna was originally for oboe and string quartet; it was written for the wonderful first oboist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Richard Woodhams, who did the first performance with the Guarneri Quartet. When I wrote it, it struck me that it could also be done in a string orchestra version. That’s the version New Century will be premiering. </p>
<p><strong>You’re also writing a new concerto, Romanza, which Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg will premiere in the spring. </strong></p>
<p>Yes, I wanted to do sort of a lyrical piece for her as soloist, with not too much pyrotechnics. I wrote it for Nadja. It’s a very un-show-offy violin concerto, and I hope it will be fun to listen to. I’ve done plenty of pieces that will scare the bejesus out of you, and this will be much milder. It’s just strings; I’m not using any winds. I just signed off on the score, and now I’m putting together a piano score for her to work with. </p>
<p><strong>What makes her a good interpreter of your music? </strong></p>
<p>She’s a fine musician, and I really enjoy working with her. I wrote my third Sonata for her, and we premiered it together, so we go back a bit. That piece was written very much with her strong bravura style in mind. It’s what she’s known for, and it’s what she does with great style. When you’re listening on the radio, you know it’s Nadja the minute you hear her — which used to be true of many more fiddlers, and I have to say that, right now, more of them sound alike than different. </p>
<p><strong>You’ve also just released a new CD with your wife, Joan. What does it include? </strong></p>
<p>It’s called Someone Talked. It’s an anthology of songs around World War II. It’s like a little radio show, without commercials. Hazen Schumacher, the narrator, is a wonderful radio personality, and it gives you a good idea of what it was like to be in the United States during World War II. I was a kid playing USO shows. </p>
<p><strong>You’ve composed so many different works — operas, symphonies, chamber works, a lot of vocal and piano music. What are the pieces you’re proudest of? </strong></p>
<p>Well, I don’t feel that I’m a very good judge of that. The ones that made the biggest difference for me, the big milestones, were an organ piece called Black Host, which I wrote 1967 for the late William Albright (it was the beginning of a kind of breakthrough style for me); and, of course, the Songs of Innocence, which I finished in 1982, would be probably my signature work. Most people who know of me seem to know it. It’s hard to say; there are things that are better known, but does that make them better? I don’t know. Maybe someone likes a piece for solo ocarina that I wrote and forgot about. You do what you do, and it’s like raising children: You really can’t pick a favorite. </p>
<p><strong>A lot of people got to know you as a composer through your work with rags. How did you get interested in that music? </strong></p>
<p>It was thoroughly serendipitous. I’d always been interested in American piano music. I was having lunch with Norman Lloyd, who was the head of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and he said there was a very good opera by Scott Joplin. I said, “Who’s Scott Joplin?” and he said he’s the man who wrote “The Maple Leaf Rag.” I called around, and no one had heard of his opera, Treemonisha. At that time I was teaching at Queens College, and I asked Rudi Blesh, who was teaching a jazz course, where I could find the opera. He said, “I have a copy at home!” He got me a copy and the piano rags, and I started recording them, and I told Josh Rifkin about them, and he went off and made a recording; and from being forgotten, Joplin became one of the canon. In the process, I started writing a few myself, and the next thing I knew there was a recording of all 22 by a young pianist named John Murphy. I sort of look at them as my mazurkas. </p>
<p><strong>Your operas — A Wedding, McTeague, A View From the Bridge — all come from very different sources. Why did you decide to adapt those particular stories? </strong></p>
<p>A View From the Bridge was a natural, because you could use the chorus so well. They were an acting presence; they had lines. That was the big problem with [Arthur] Miller’s play: The neighbors couldn’t open their mouths, because if they did, you couldn’t afford to put it on! In the opera, they get to be the real chorus. That’s the thing — you have to find some entrée, otherwise don’t make an opera out of it. You have to find something you can do that can only be done by opera. McTeaguewas the same way; I thought there was an opera in there, and I thought so way back when I was at Stanford. </p>
<p><strong>Is there another opera in your future? </strong></p>
<p>At the moment, I have a few things floating around, things that people want to do. But nobody’s got any money for new operas — although A View From the Bridge sold better than anything else in the 2002 season at the Met. Someone did a production of [it] with two pianos in a tiny theater in Brooklyn, and I think we’re going to see more “pocket” productions, because a lot of companies are going belly up. </p>
<p><strong>Aside from the finances, how has the business of composing and conducting changed throughout your career? </strong></p>
<p>Actually, I’ve been rather lucky. I have new commissions coming in through 2012. I’ve been commissioned quite steadily for the last few years, and haven’t noticed any real drop. And we’re still doing concerts. I had a bit of a fallow period last year, with four concert cancellations, and a few months when we weren’t touring, but that turned out to be sort of a boon. I’m 71, and getting on planes isn’t fun anymore. </p>
<p><strong>Have the Internet and new technologies made it easier to be a composer? </strong></p>
<p>Not really. There was a festival of my work in Minneapolis a year ago and a reporter called from a free paper there and said, “How come I’ve never heard of you?” </p>
<p><strong>If you could program a dream concert of your music — perhaps works you haven’t heard performed for a while — what would it include? </strong></p>
<p>I would love to see McTeague done again. It would be a natural in San Francisco, because that’s the locale. I’d love to hear the Whitman Triptych and the Fourth Symphony. I should mention that the same weekend as the New Century’s May concerts, the Lark Quartet and the baritone Stephen Salters are playing a new piece of mine at Stanford. It’s called Billy and the Darbies. The texts are by Melville; it has to do with Billy Budd, and darbies is an old English name for handcuffs. </p>
<p><em>Georgia Rowe is a Bay Area arts writer. Her work has appeared in Opera News,Gramophone, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Contra Costa Times.</em></p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005075
2016-03-03T21:26:14-06:00
2016-03-03T21:32:25-06:00
Survival: Continuing as Artists
<p><strong>Rackham School of Graduate Studies, University of Michigan </strong><br><br>Speech at the Reception and Induction of New Members of Phi Kappa Phi <br><em>March 15, 2009 </em></p>
<p>Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. I’ll be talking to you today about something very much on my mind, the continuation of artistic health in a hostile environment. I should qualify that remark: it is often said that America is a philistine country toward the arts, and there is some truth to that. But I would contend that perhaps in some ways the US relative lack of support might have been healthier for these arts in some ways than the European state support has proven to be, which I’ll come to later. The comparisons of the two scenes, at the admittedly anecdotal level I can cite in my own history as composer for concert hall, cabaret, stage, opera, ballet, film — in other words what a busy composer does these days in the 20th and 21st centuries — will be the basis for my text. </p><!-- more -->
<p>When I was a young student in Paris in the late fifties and early sixties, the word on the street from other American artists abroad was one short word — envy — at how lucky our European colleagues were. The second world war had left so much of their world in ruins and depression, and one of the objectives, I’m told, of the Marshall Plan was the rebuilding of each country’s culture; this is of course an oversimplification and not completely true, I’m also told, but the perception was then certainly that General Marshall held the arts in high regard as a means of restarting a traumatized Europe. A huge upsurge of state support of the arts ensued in many countries — France, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the UK, and others more and more as time went on. </p>
<p>Suddenly Dutch painters or composers or writers had only to apply for state funds to subvention their art, and that state helped them in multiple ways, showcasing warehousing paintings, publishing books, and performing commissioned new music. (Their music support program was called DONEMUS, as I remember, and Dutch composers toured around Europe and the US with freshly-minted scores to donate to libraries.) The European avant-garde composers Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio would emerge in the fifties as the enfants terribles of France, West Germany and Italy. The agreed-upon feeling everywhere in Europe was that the past was dead — les grandes nuits europeennes proved that everyone would have to start all over again as in Edith Piaf’s hit song — and the state would now become the repository and principal Maecenas of the most cutting-edge and advanced art available. </p>
<p>A wave of state-supported iconoclasts in Europe in the 1950s was the result. (There was even money to be made by those early pioneers: a Stockhausen collage piece,Hymnen, fashioned from national anthems and running several hours, reportedly garnered a quarter of a million dollars in a year from state-radio royalties.) The Germans, who after all had caused European wars two times in a row in the first place, were seemingly awarded the most money of any European country to support the arts, which made a number of my French friends furious. But I have to say that many of us worked in West Germany because the pay was good, and even if the Germans weren’t terribly friendly no one there seemed to mind, at least in the theaters in the Ruhr Valley where I wrote a number of stage-music scores, that some of us weren’t ethnically German, as they would have had we wanted to emigrate there to join them. These recently-repaired towns, whose medieval center cities had been bombed flat, had such identical new downtown sections it was often hard to remember which town one was in. These places weren’t necessarily fun to work in; the war memories and traumas were very close to the surface of German psyches, and my strongest memory of that time is of people yelling at each other, my landlady chewing me out for some minor infraction, tension in rehearsals — but we sang our mantra “the pay is good” and took our money home. </p>
<p>What has happened in France, Germany, or Italy as a result of all this state money is not totally a success story in the long run, I feel. It was a truly wonderful thing in the fifties at first to be avant-garde, and approved for being so, by the state, and those first years’ products have an undeniable vitality. It seems to me however that, at least in France and also definitely elsewhere in Western Europe, the avant-garde of the 1960s has hardened into a musical atherosclerosis (with exceptions of course). The reason for this is not hard to find; a style-leader becomes powerful in the ministry, and other artists follow esthetic suit because that way they’ll get grants. The erstwhile iconoclast has provided a new icon, and a new “tradition” results — what I call old-fashioned avant-garde — that resembles distressingly what we felt impelled to do around 1960 (I felt the same about the music I saw and heard in Berkeley in 2005!). Perhaps some people have possibly composed a lifetime’s oeuvre that is fatally skewed from the course they might have followed without such peer pressure, and that thought saddens me. </p>
<p>I can compare the European avant-garde of the 1950s and later to that of America because I was in both places then. When I had to leave my studies at the Paris Conservatoire and return to the US in 1961 I found a musical embargo against the Boulez/Stockhausen/Berio triumvirate in New York concert halls, partially because of an expectable critical kibosh but also because of resistance from embattled American avantgardists, presumably jealous of all the gravy their European counterparts were happily soaking in; I would have to leave New York later that year to go to the San Francisco Bay Area before I could find many musicians interested in exploring the newest from Europe. (I believe I premiered Stockhausen’s Kontrapunkte in the United States around 1962 in San Francisco, playing the piano part). On both sides of the Atlantic serialism (you might know the term “twelve-tone” but that is only one form of serialism) was the wave of the future, though the modus operandi were different; no-one’s music seemed to cross the ocean in those contentious times despite, or perhaps because of, certain similarities. </p>
<p>In the general upsurge of logical positivism of the era, emphasis on methods prevailed: tone rows, logarithms, stochastic and aleatoric procedures and the like were the works of faith here and abroad. Consciously or unconsciously, one of the shared objectives for each continent’s composers was to efface the past with new work by violently changing the way one wrote music. In painting such periods of dramatic change are styled Mannerist, where how one paints trumps what one paints, and I have elsewhere written how this fits a period of 20th-century composition. Usually expansion of musical vocabulary is followed by a reconnaissance mission of discovering what of this new language is of use to us musically over time, and in a healthy culture the eventual dividend is greater and more articulated expressivity for music. </p>
<p>But we are still digesting so many shocks the last century laid on us that we often can’t see clearly where we are in matters of style; never mind — it will work out, I think, over time — but perhaps the continued resistance to music by audiences in the last half-century is partly due to a sometime divorcement from concerns of whether any audience needs to understand it. (It is also true that music once thought too difficult becomes the central music for a later generation; however, a music’s difficulty doesn’t guarantee its later being adopted, understood, loved, or — most important — needed.) State support can only help make art insular, and it may be that European music suffers worse from this cut-off-ness than our own. One thing is certain: in America we give so little from the government for the arts that private monies must be raised to put on anything much at all, and maybe this has caused a timorous conservatism — after all, donors need to be pleased or they won’t give money in some cases — in our new work. </p>
<p>Our American arts institutions are in constant financial crisis particularly right now, but they do limp along often as not in some fashion. But in Europe, where private support is rare, donor money rarely is called upon to shore up or save an institution in trouble. In the spring of 2005 my wife and I, with our friends the composer-soprano Susan Botti and the Austrian composer-conductor HK Gruber, performed a concert together with the Radio Symphony of Utrecht. This excellent orchestra played to about a half a house (new music isn’t necessarily a big draw these days in Europe either), but the really sad part is that this would be the final concert of that orchestra with the Netherlands cutting off all its funds; trying to find private money to save it as we might do in the US was evidently not even considered, and the Radio Symphony of Utrecht is no more. </p>
<p>I mention European music because in the field of art music — that is, non-popular music — America still tends to think like a bunch of colonists. Any foreign orchestral conductor is ipso facto better than our own guys in the eyes of symphony boards — just look at the roster of American orchestras — and if we see an increase of native-born music directors recently, we still see a preponderance of old European classics in their programming. So that the native product has been somewhat at a disadvantage, but I feel that, once we really understand the particular needs and tendencies Americans share nationwide, we can reverse this. (Again, back briefly to the subject of orchestras, those from our country are routinely considered the best anywhere. This would be a great national milieu for the orchestra to evolve from the late-19th-century model except in that it would be prohibitive financially to do so; also, many sponsors and subscribers — and I suppose musicians as well — want the big-city orchestras to continue to concentrate on the standard repertoire of over 100 years ago because they love that music the most. And it would be a shame to be deprived of such a rich and glorious tradition in the interest of homespun nativism — we are from many nations, and their artistic background makes up a large part of what we are.) </p>
<p>Americans, and much of the rest of the world, are suffering a great economic crisis, which usually means that arts money is cut first — it usually has been in our history. But it has not always been so, even here. Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Projects Administration — the WPA — was founded to give artists all over the US work in the lean Depression economy, and we are still reaping benefits from that time; countless examples all over the US, like the Raoul Pene du Bois murals in the Saratoga Springs post office, enrich their communities still. I am hoping that the current Administration will show wisdom in reviving some of the best aspects of that troubled but fruitful period to help us out of this deep national slump. One of the best aspects in my view of the WPA was its recognition that, unlike European countries where London and Paris are the undisputed cultural centers of the UK and France, we have actually many centers here — more like the German model today, where one can easily travel by train or Autobahn to Wuppertal to see Pina Bausch’s dance company, or to Hamburg for new opera, or to Stuttgart or Frankfort for new visual art. This is not to discount New York’s importance. But, as I remind you later, at the moment New York has become more a showcase for imported art than a self-generator of it. </p>
<p>For an exciting example of native American energy, Chicago has around 118 registered theaters whose original work has often alimented the Broadway stage — many, perhaps most, New York productions have been developed out of town in places like Baltimore (“Hairspray”) — and now we see Kansas City becoming a place for painters and other artists to congregate. My wife and I can attest to the surprising increasing excellence of community orchestras where we’ve performed in unlikely places like Idaho Falls, Idaho; Evansville, Indiana; and Lancaster, Ohio, which recently produced a stunning CD of my music featuring the virtuoso clarinetist Richard Stoltzman that I would put up against any recording of my work. These cities are increasingly proud of their own arts organizations and feel proprietary about them, as well they should. I’ll never forget a stellar performance of my piano concerto a few years ago by Alan Chow (from Northwestern) and the very elegant Omaha Symphony; the pre-concert talk was attended by at last a third of the full-house audience. I’ve seen similar grass-roots support from Santa Cruz to Kalamazoo; the orchestra players are from the towns, many having majored in music knowing they wanted to make the greater part of their livings otherwise in livable environments but continue to play, and the result is constantly-improving ensembles all over as a national phenomenon. </p>
<p>Compare this with the precarious job-to-job existence so many New York free-lance musicians live under, with maxed-out credit cards, no savings, wall-to-wall pickup jobs. A community orchestra in a midsize American town might only do four concerts in a year; these are often done for the joy of it and no pay, although concertmasters and first-chair players are often compensated. Other cities with bigger orchestral seasons often have a paid core constituency of around 30 permanent musicians, with free-lance, add-on players as needed; life isn’t necessarily easy for either of these kinds of players, but somehow one sees them mostly muddling through and continuing. By contrast the excellent Brooklyn Philharmonic, made up of many of the best free-lance New Yorkers, only does four concerts a year and now has to cancel its last scheduled one this year as well all of next year’s season; these players make their whole livings in music and don’t have another main source of income to sustain them, as players might in other cities when music doesn’t put food on the table. Brooklyn’s and Queens’s orchestras pay very little anyway; a piece of mine scheduled by the Brooklyn in 1986 was postponed by a strike — the players wanted more than the $30 per rehearsal they were getting (which would just pay cab fare for a cellist from Manhattan who couldn’t negotiate the subway stairs) and $89 per concert, as I remember — and the players finally settled for what I think was $35 per rehearsal and $109 per concert. You can’t live on that. </p>
<p>Life for artists in Manhattan is increasingly unaffordable — though I hear that the recent general drop in rents is making things a little easier — so that many of us have opted over the years to go elsewhere; I myself after a number of free-lance years came from New York to Ann Arbor for a university job from which I’ve just retired after 35 years’ teaching, and our performing and composing careers have been just as healthy as they might have been had we stayed in the city, and with considerably less strain on us financially and physically. But I don’t want to see continue what seems so largely to be the case in my beloved New York; most everything now seems to be an import from some other part of the US or from abroad, and little seems to come from local sources — a far cry from the indigenous excitement in painting, theater, poetry, and the other arts of a half-century ago — and one fears a growing cultural moribundity in some large cities both here and in Europe because artists can’t make a sufficient living there and will leave. Just as we need to address local arts concerns in smaller towns, we need to find art’s grass roots under the concrete of Manhattan and other big centers again. If too many of us have to leave New York for economic reasons, the city suffers, its theaters and concert halls reduced to booking houses for everything brought in, and there are times I actually feel guilty about leaving it. </p>
<p>Why are these arts important, and why are they so beleaguered in our culture? There has always been a contingent of American lawmakers who pooh-pooh the arts — these are often the same people who happily cut school funding for the arts, dismissing them as frills — but former New York governor Mario Cuomo reminds us that one dollar spent by a city on the arts results in four dollars of revenue for that city, and I have seen communities grow in size and importance because of the introduction of a festival. Look for example at Moab, Utah, near the great rock formations of The Arches and Bryce Canyon, but until recently less a tourist destination for these natural beauties than a truck stop between Denver and Albuquerque. Around eighteen years ago a friend, the conductor Michael Barrett, was visiting Moab when he was asked to found a music festival there. No one then envisioned that, partly because of out-of-town interest in the Moab Festival, the town would grow in population to twice its original size since, with sophisticated restaurants, a thriving arts scene, and far greater prosperity. Another success story: retirees from Chicago and other large cities living in Hilton Head, missing a town orchestra, got money together to form one. Its conductor, not one of those many conducting journeymen who kiss in and depart after concerts, had to be willing to live there full-time to give the ensemble a sense of groundedness in the community. Up until recently the orchestra had to give concerts in a church, like in many towns; Hilton Head has recently completed its own concert hall. </p>
<p>With the coming disappearance of second homes from many Americans’ lives, music and the other arts in some towns like Moab — which have become retirement communities for those who scorn the expensive prisonlike walled enclaves in warm states — may not necessarily thrive in the austerity years to come. Maybe it is more important for us, right now, to make people’s first homes and their cultural lives there more bearable. If the various stimulus packages are properly spent in our problem cities, arts could become the principal agent of each community’s turnaround. </p>
<p>I opined earlier that perhaps we were healthier in our state-unsupported arts scene — the National Endowment for the Arts gives such a pittance compared with parallel institutions abroad — than what seems to me the arts-on-life-support feeling I get from so much I come across nowadays in and from Europe. I don’t however want our national philistinism to go unchallenged; those clowns in Congress who have shot down so much of our culture — and we’ve always, always had people like them — need to be fought constantly without cease. But right now, this moment, we have a way to shout the clowns down maybe for a bit longer, because their way of doing things has so roundly and patently failed. Perhaps our administration should study the WPA as a model, and go even further in helping communities large and small find creative health. The New York State Council for the Arts has a program — which I hope won’t be cut in these parlous times — of establishing artists-in-residence in towns as small as 600 people; each town pays the artist’s health insurance and a small stipend with the hope that artist’s work will put their hometown on the map, bringing in visitors to eat in restaurants, stay in homes or hotels, perhaps move there to live. It is now possible to buy a whole house in blighted Detroit for hundreds of dollars, and there have been feelers enticing artists to move there to enliven the community. With municipal effort to nurture a high enough level of artistic excellence, Detroit may well again become a place to attract, and not repel, a young and vibrant population. </p>
<p>All this will need the help of young and enlightened people such as yourselves in this room who can see long-term benefits in engendering artistic ferment in troubled and untroubled areas of our country, and I urge you all to help creative people make America not just a country with a centralized artistic scene — which we mustn’t entirely give up — but one full of multifarious artistic joy and fulfillment, all across our enormous nation.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005082
2016-03-03T21:25:22-06:00
2017-01-16T08:30:12-06:00
From the Top: William Bolcom joins teens to play his music
<p><a contents="Listen to the story at National Public Radio&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98811676" target="_blank">Listen to the story at National Public Radio </a></p>
<p><a contents="Visit William Bolcom's Page at National Public Radio&nbsp;" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.npr.org/artists/15287558/william-bolcom" target="_blank">Visit William Bolcom's Page at National Public Radio </a></p>
<p><em><strong>December 31, 2008 </strong></em>- This week, gifted young musicians gather at Boston's New England Conservatory to perform music by an American original — William Bolcom, who joins them in a concert of his music. A 17-year-old violinist plays the "Graceful Ghost" rag, a 14-year-old soprano enlivens a campy cabaret song, and a teen string quartet performs music Bolcom wrote at age 12. </p><!-- more -->
<div class="captioned justify_center"><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/0095ab089de0bbfa67ea0d8e165b4cd1b1777071/medium/from-the-top.jpg?1453671708" class="size_orig justify_center border_" /><p class="caption"> </p></div>
<p>Karen Cueva's earliest memory is of holding a violin. It was at her very first music lesson when she was a toddler and she's been hooked on the fiddle ever since. Now a student at Walnut Hill, a prestigious arts school just outside of Boston, 17-year-old Cueva performs regularly with New England Conservatory's Youth Philharmonic Orchestra. </p>
<p>Melanie Sierra first performed on From the Top when she was ten years old. A miniature dynamo with a powerful singing voice and the acting chops to match, she performed "They Say It's Wonderful," from Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun. Four years later, now she's back to perform "Amor" from Bolcom's Cabaret Songs, with the composer himself at the piano. </p>
<p>Sierra knew she wanted to be a singer by the time she was three. </p>
<p>"I loved watching Judy Garland films, especially the Wizard of Oz," she recalls. "Hearing Judy Garland sing was amazing to me. I became obsessed." </p>
<p>Sierra says years ago her grandmother was also obsessed with singing, but never pursued a career. </p>
<p>"In her time it wasn't right for a society girl to perform onstage," explains Sierra, whose sister is an opera singer. "Not only do my sister and I sing for ourselves, but we sing for her too. We are also exploring her dream." </p>
<p>Eleven-year-old Brian Ge demanded piano lessons before he had even turned three. </p>
<p>"My older brother played the piano and I liked to sing along," he says. "I couldn't wait to play piano myself." </p>
<p>Today, Ge attends the Juilliard School pre-college division where he studies piano with Veda Kaplisky. </p>
<p>In addition to being a talented pianist, Ge also sings with the Metropolitan Opera Children's Chorus and is a competitive swimmer. He performs Bagatelles Nos. 5-9, from Bolcom's Nine Bagatelles. </p>
<p>Meet the Bolcom Bros: 16-year-old violinists Ryan Shannon and Brendan O'Donnell, 17-year-old violist William Neri, and 16-year-old cellist Quinn Kalmansson — all students at the Walnut Hill School in Massachusetts. The four teens got together to revive Bolcom's "String Quartet No. 2" — music that hadn't been performed since the composer wrote it at age 12. </p>
<p>Learning the work posed a special challenge for the young musicians: the score was handwritten (and sometimes tricky to decipher) and there were no recordings available for them to reference. </p>
<p>"It was the first time any of us had ever played a piece without listening to a recording to help us figure out an approach to take," says O'Donnell. </p>
<p>Bolcom had not heard his Quartet played in over 50 years. </p>
<p>To conclude the show, host Christopher O'Riley joins the Bolcom Bros, playing movements three and four from Bolcom's Piano Quintet. </p>
<p>Bolcom felt a sense of satisfaction after hearing his works come to life in the hands of these young musicians. </p>
<p>"These kids are phenomenal," he said. "They are among the very best musicians I've ever dealt with!" </p>
<p>Special guest William Bolcom is a composer of cabaret songs, concertos, sonatas, chamber music, operas and symphonies. He was named 2007 Composer of the Year by Musical America, and was honored with multiple Grammy Awards for his ground-breaking setting of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." In 1988 Bolcom was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Twelve New Etudes for piano, and in 2006 he received the National Arts Award. In 2008 James Levine led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Bolcom's Eighth Symphony.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005091
2016-03-03T21:22:21-06:00
2016-03-03T21:33:12-06:00
A Bernstein / Bolcom Celebration - Program Notes
<p><strong>Program Notes by Steven Blier </strong><br>September 23 and 25, 2008, Merkin Hall <br>© 2008 <a contents="New York Festival of Song" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://nyfos.org" target="_blank">New York Festival of Song</a> (Listen to the feature story online at <a contents="http://www.wnyc.org/story/56893-a-bernsteinbolcom-celebration/" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://www.wnyc.org/story/56893-a-bernsteinbolcom-celebration/" target="_blank">http://www.wnyc.org/story/56893-a-bernsteinbolcom-celebration/</a>) </p>
<p>If Michael Barrett and I were to create our own musical Mount Rushmore, we would have to start with sixty-foot sculptures of Leonard Bernstein and William Bolcom. We might argue about the other two profiles—I’d be lobbying for Carlo Maria Giulini, and Michael would be pushing for Robert Schumann—but Lenny and Bill would certainly have pride of place.</p><!-- more -->
<p>Like many Americans my age, I grew up watching Maestro Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on television, and later caught some of them live at what was then known as Philharmonic Hall. Bernstein’s blend of passion and clarity was a source of fascination. His uncondescending respect for all genres of music gave an entire generation the permission to evaluate and respond openheartedly to everything from Top 40 hits to aleatory orchestral experiments. I’ll never forget his 1965 appearance with Janis Ian on a national television show called Inside the Rock Revolution. Bernstein analyzed “Society’s Child” with the same fervor he brought to Mahler symphonies, and wrapped the young singer/songwriter in the embrace he used for stars like Mstislav Rostropovich and Glenn Gould. He was over the top before the phrase even existed, but his uninhibited, Dionysian, physical reaction to music did not bypass the intellect. Bernstein gave you plenty of hard facts along with his dazzling showmanship, and lots of musical steak along with the acrobatic sizzle of his podium gyrations. </p>
<p>I admit that Leonard Bernstein’s extravagant, sweaty theatrics were always a little threatening to me, but they were also a big turn-on. When I first encountered William Bolcom, he was, by comparison, the “Essence of Cool.” I first became aware of him in the early 1970s, during the Ragtime Revival. The dapper elegance of his LPHeliotrope Bouquet redefined hipness, and his records of American vaudeville tunes with his wife Joan Morris seduced a surprisingly wide spectrum of listeners, including my brother who was more oriented to driving rock bands than piano-and-voice recitals. I heard Joan and Bill live for the first time exactly thirty years ago at Tully Hall, having been obsessed with their records for several years. Their concert of American popular song, spanning the hundred years from the Civil War era to the 1960s, was a life-changing experience for me. They wore their scholarship lightly as they footnoted their material with the gentlest touch of historical background. Every song blazed into life, and they were able to plumb the despair of Kay Swift’s “Can’t We Be Friends” without losing the song’s essential lightness. At the end of that evening, I announced to the empty air, “Well, that’s what a song recital ought to be!” It is no coincidence that NYFOS sprang to life ten years later; the first seed was planted that night by Bolcom and Morris. </p>
<p>Bernstein and Bolcom entranced me both as performers and as spokesmen for their wide-ranging musical enthusiasms. Their command of music history seemed to stretch from the cavemen to the rappers. There was no corner of music that they hadn’t explored, no idiom that they had not embraced, no significant performer whose work they didn’t know intimately. And their warm acceptance of so many musical styles has lent depth and variety to the songs they’ve written. So has their deep knowledge of the world’s literature, not a necessary trait for a successful songwriter, but an enriching one. </p>
<p>Another salient quality that links these two songwriters is their highly developed performer’s instinct for audiences. Unlike many composers, both of them spent a lot of time making music in public, and their long experience in theaters, concert halls—and even (in Bolcom’s case) Seattle’s burlesque houses—made both of them masters of dramatic tension, expert humorists, and aces of theatrical rhythm. </p>
<p>Bernstein and Bolcom do have a lot in common, but they are distinctly different breeds of American maverick. By now, the career of Leonard Bernstein has become a legend. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918, educated at Boston Latin School, Harvard, and Curtis, he became the assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1943. When music director Bruno Walter fell ill one autumn day during Bernstein’s first season of tenure, the twenty-five-year old maestro stepped in on short notice to conduct the matinee broadcast performance. His sensational debut launched him first to national fame, and later into the international arena. Bernstein became the first American to conduct at La Scala, and what a debut: Cherubini’sMedea with Maria Callas in 1953. Five years later, he became the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, dramatically raising the orchestra’s profile through his charisma, good looks, and energetic spontaneity. Under Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic was chic, not stuffy. Later on, he conquered that tradition-bound stronghold, Vienna; they championed the Jewish-American maestro even when he tackled their most sacredly held works, including the Mahler symphonies and Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. </p>
<p>From the beginning of his career, Bernstein balanced his life as a conductor of “serious music” with his unabashed love for popular musical theater. He had already demonstrated his respect for jazz during his college days. At Harvard, his thesis was entitled The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music, and its first sentence set out the mission that would define his life: “I propose a new and vital American nationalism; it is my task to define it.” The rhythms of jazz, often spiced with the cadences of Jewish liturgy, became his hallmark. He brought the musical ethos of Harold Arlen and George Gershwin definitively into the concert hall, and in doing so, he redefined the very meaning of classical music. </p>
<p>All music-lovers know Bernstein’s legacy so well that it is easy to forget how unusual his achievements are. He created something no other superstar conductor had done before: a canon of Broadway shows that have achieved the status of classics. After his nights at the Philharmonic, he hung out with a group of cabaret performers called The Revuers. They weren’t big stars at the time, but they soon would be: Judy Holliday (later the star of Born Yesterday and Bells Are Ringing); and Betty Comden and Adolph Green (whose resumés would eventually boast Singin’ in the Rain, On the Twentieth Century, and The Will Rogers Follies). When Bernstein teamed up with choreographer Jerome Robbins and director George Abbott to enlarge his 1944 ballet suite Fancy Free into a full-length Broadway musical, he brought on his friends Comden and Green as lyricists and lead actors. The result—a smash hit called On the Town—launched Bernstein’s career on Broadway. He was 26 years old. Peter Pan, Wonderful Town, Candide, and West Side Story followed—as well as his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti, whose portrait of a failing marriage in 1950s suburbia has survived the test of time and become a modern-day classic. Tonight, we’ll focus onWonderful Town, whose score has always had a special appeal for me. We’ve got two of its greatest hits: “One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man,” a comedy number written to Rosalind Russell’s specifications (sing a verse, top with a joke, repeat four times), and “Ohio,” which gives a real swing to this “swing state.” We also offer “The Story of My Life,” a beautiful song—half ballad, half comedy routine—that got cut during tryouts when it proved to be a showstopper in the negative sense. </p>
<p>Since Bernstein was both a conductor and a Broadway composer, it is no surprise that the lion’s share of his songs are either from shows or written for voice and orchestra. His piano-and-voice repertoire is minuscule: four song cycles (I Hate Music, La bonne cuisine, Two Love Songs set to poems of Rilke, and Arias and Barcarolles for piano four-hands and two voices), in addition to a few odds and ends written for special occasions. Of those songs, Arias and Barcarolles has the most depth and importance, and I don’t think my opinion is born purely out of personal bias. It is true that As and Bs, Bernstein’s last completed work, was crucial to NYFOS’s history: the composer gave NYFOS the rights to its American premiere, and that 1989 concert helped launch our fledgling organization. Having played the work many times, I am still moved by the insight it gives into Bernstein’s character, as well as by its wide range of musical styles, from the Broadway cadences of “Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight” to the twelve-tone row of “The Love of My Life,” which we’re offering tonight. In this song, Bernstein seems to unveil the sadness and confusion of his soul. Don’t miss the quote of Wagner’s famous Tristan und Isoldetheme at the end of the song—sly, funny, and devastating all at the same time. </p>
<p>While Bernstein’s performing life was spent mainly in front of orchestras, William Bolcom’s career has centered around the piano; he has been accompanying his wife Joan Morris in recital for over three decades. It makes sense that most of his songs are written for voice and piano—four books of Cabaret Songs, several song cycles (I Will Breathe a Mountain, for Marilyn Horne, and Briefly It Enters, for Benita Valente), choral works (including The Mask and The More Loving One), and vocal chamber music (most notably Let Evening Come, written for soprano Benita Valente and violist Michael Tree, with Cynthia Raim at the piano). Last season, NYFOS commissioned and premiered Bolcom’s new chamber opera, Lucrezia—brilliantly scored, NYFOS-style, for two pianos, “in the grand Broadway tradition of Ohman and Arden,” as Bill described it. </p>
<p>This is not to undercut Bolcom’s stunning output in other genres: eight symphonies, three operas, three musical theater works (“actors’ operas,” he once called them—Dynamite Tonite, Greatshot, and Casino Paradise), the Pulitzer Prize-winning 12 New Etudes for Piano, and the magnificent William Blake cantata, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Leonard Bernstein may have been eclectic—I once heard him toss off a rap song at a New Year’s Eve concert—but when it comes to mixing genres, no one has outdone William Bolcom. The Blake piece runs the gamut from country and western, rock, blues, and reggae numbers to sections reminiscent of Mahler and Berg, neoclassicism, atonal music, and folk songs. </p>
<p>Bolcom came to prominence more gradually than Bernstein. He was clearly destined for music from an early age; when he was eleven, his parents enrolled him at the University of Washington to study composition and piano one day a week. But he was not catapulted into stardom in his early 20s, as Leonard Bernstein had been. After receiving his B.A from the U. of W. at age 20, he continued his studies at Mills College with French composer Darius Milhaud. Bolcom went on to finish his doctorate at Stanford University, and then enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire to continue his work with Milhaud and take “esthétique musicale” classes from Olivier Messaien. </p>
<p>The freewheeling and prolific Milhaud proved to be a powerful influence on Bolcom. Among the many valuable things Milhaud passed on to his American student was his love of Latin music. In 1917, Milhaud had gone to Brazil as secretary to the writer and diplomat Paul Claudel. He stayed in São Paulo for two years, reveling in the sound of sambas, tangos, and the wild cadences of Brazil’s native cultures—the authentic version of “jungle music.” Bolcom, Milhaud’s prize pupil, went on to become an advocate for the Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth and helped to popularize Astor Piazzola’s nuevo tango in American concert settings. Bill’s feeling for South American rhythms is of a piece with his passion for early American ragtime composers like Scott Joplin, W. C. Handy, and Eubie Blake, all of whom were brushed by what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Latin tinge.” </p>
<p>Like most composers of his generation, Bolcom was indoctrinated in the prevailing serialist/modernist precepts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but very soon he broke away and began serving up what I call the “Bolcom Salad.” Freely mixing every kind of tonality and atonality with the cadences of popular styles and dance rhythms, he flouted all doctrines, received wisdoms, trends, and fashions. While Bernstein worked within the system, imposing his powerful vision on Broadway and at Lincoln Center, Bolcom seemed resolutely tied to the counterculture, a musical hippie. He was certainly on the radar screen, especially through his recordings on Nonesuch that brought him a wide following. But in the 1970s and 80s, his compositions were mostly premiered by mid-size organizations like the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, or at Aspen; his theater works were seen at the Yale Repertory Theater, or the Guthrie in Minneapolis, or off-Broadway, rather than on the Great White Way. </p>
<p>When I first knew Bill in the 1970s, he demonstrated a certain disdain for classical singing, although he’d done his time as a vocal répétiteur as a young man. (“Maybe that was the cause of the disdain,” he muttered.) He couldn’t understand why opera professionals continued to study voice throughout their careers—“Haven’t they learned how to sing by now?” he asked—and tended to characterize the full-throated cry of a soprano as “inexpressive.” Like Sondheim, he preferred the dryer verbal and emotional clarity of actors to the opulent roar of unamplified tenors. Bolcom’s transition from the cowboy of classical music (which is how I always thought of him) to the guru of classical music (which is closer to his current status) began in 1984 with Songs of Innocence and of Experience. It was simply too big and too good to be ignored. I first heard it at BAM, the New York theater that is so “downtown” it’s all the way in Brooklyn; but when the oratorio came to Carnegie Hall a year or so later, the concert seemed like a coronation for the Hippie Prince of Music. </p>
<p>I think that writing Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which included difficult, extended sections for operatic voices, must have started to open Bolcom’s mind to the new trends in classical singing. Bill was becoming aware that opera singers in the late twentieth century had developed far greater acting skills than the “park-and-bark” school that had prevailed through the 1950s and 60s—not to mention far more natural English diction. “After all, how many other singers from that time can you count—besides Evelyn Lear—whose English you could understand?” he commented. </p>
<p>From my perspective, Bill’s Great Breakthrough became definitive in 1991 when he was commissioned by Carnegie Hall to write a song cycle for Marilyn Horne and pianist Martin Katz. The night they premiered the work, I Will Breathe a Mountain, the pre-concert lecture and Q & A session was a slightly surreal experience: the doyenne of classical singing fielding questions seated right next to music’s Wild Man of Borneo. The cycle exploited the range, virtuosity, and expressivity of Horne’s singing, to say nothing of Martin Katz’s dazzling piano technique. Bolcom had already been invited to write his first opera for the Chicago Lyric (McTeague, 1992), followed in rapid succession by two more commissions from the Lyric, A View from the Bridge(1999) and A Wedding (2004). More song cycles followed too, composed for another of classical music’s staunchest citizens, Benita Valente. </p>
<p>To encapsulate Bolcom’s vocal music in a mere half of a recital, we’ll sample his work in four genres. The smorgasbord starts with two art songs: the brash “How to Swing Those Obbligatos Around,” a lurching tango that includes a couple of coloratura licks written to show off Rossini whiz Horne; and “Otherwise,” whose pure line and harpsichord-like accompaniment evoke the pristine sensibility of Mozart specialist Valente. To hear Bill-the-opera-composer, we’ll offer three excerpts from McTeague,including one of opera’s great modern mad scenes, “Golden Babies.” Casino Paradiserepresents his “actors’ operas.” Though Bill and his long-time librettist Arnold Weinstein grappled for years with Casino’s unwieldy book, its songs find both the composer and the lyricist at their very best. (Casino is my favorite Bolcom/Weinstein score.) Bill’s most famous vocal pieces are his Cabaret Songs; for tonight, we’ve chosen “Waitin’” and “Blue,” in which I feel Arnold left us his most touching and revealing self-portraits. </p>
<p>Bolcom thrives as he celebrates his seventieth birthday. His inspiration seems as unbridled as ever, and his works are now heard in all the major concert venues. A View From the Bridge even got produced at the Met, which brought another delicious moment of cognitive dissonance for those of us who have watched him slowly embrace this art form. Seeing Bill Bolcom and Arnold Weinstein take their bows on opening night, December 5, 2002, was my clearest signal that a new century had indeed begun. <br>The end of Bernstein’s career, on the other hand, found the maestro struggling with an escalating series of creative problems. In the 1963-4 season, he took an early sabbatical from the Philharmonic to give himself time to compose. During six of those months he holed up with his On the Town team—Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green—to write a musical based on The Skin of Our Teeth. They were excited about turning Thornton Wilder’s play into a Broadway show. But the project fizzled. Only one song emerged, “Spring Will Come Again,” whose beautiful melody Bernstein grabbed for his Chichester Psalms. It was a grim experience for the maestro. Everyone was waiting for him to write another piece with the immediate popular appeal of West Side Story, but the muses were proving recalcitrant. </p>
<p>Bernstein seemed to have thrived on overcommitment. In 1967 he stepped down as principal conductor of the Philharmonic in order to devote himself to composition; nine years later he left his troubled marriage in order to allow his homosexuality full play. Attempting to give himself more freedom in his musical and emotional life, he instead encountered some serious reversals. <br>This is not to dismiss the final two decades of Bernstein’ life, which certainly had their share of successes—Songfest (1977) is a dazzling composition, and Arias and Barcarolles (1988) can stand with his best works. The controversial Mass (1971) contains many wonderful moments (and also a fair share of unfortunate lyrics). He continued to make some beautiful recordings (the Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic), as well as some eccentric ones (La bohème, West Side Story), and he flourished as a teacher and mentor to young conductors. But his biggest projects were misfires, and highly publicized ones. His much-anticipated bicentennial musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, ran seriously aground and closed after seven performances on Broadway. His next work for the theater, the opera A Quiet Place, was panned at its 1983 premiere in Houston. The opera was a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, which Bernstein originally used verbatim as the first act of the new work. A subsequent revision, which played at La Scala and the Vienna Staastoper, vastly restructured and improved the work; but the contrast between the bleak, late-Lenny music of A Quiet Place and the immediate appeal of Trouble in Tahiti, written thirty years earlier, remained a stumbling block for many listeners. It seemed that the more directly Bernstein tried to compose serious, large-scale works about his great concern, “the crisis in faith,” the more he seemed to lose his way. </p>
<p>But Leonard Bernstein remained the king of classical music to the end. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it was Bernstein who conducted Beethoven’s Ninth at the ruins. He was his old, fiery self—and impetuously changed the famous Ode to Joy(Freude) to an Ode to Freedom (Freiheit). <br>Michael Barrett and I were with our two idols on only one occasion: a concert at Alice Tully Hall in February of 1988. We were putting on an early celebration of Bernstein’s 70th birthday, which wasn’t actually until August—we wanted to get our tribute in before anyone else did. Dawn Upshaw led the proceedings off with “I Hate Music,” and before the applause started we heard the maestro’s distinctive rumble of approval, “Good!” Linda Lavin sang and danced “Swing,” from Wonderful Town, Comden and Green did their hilarious parody lyrics of “Lonely Town,” and at the very last minute, we snagged Bolcom and Morris, who were about to board a plane back to Ann Arbor, to come back into town and perform “What a Movie!,” Dinah’s aria from Trouble in Tahiti. </p>
<p>Joan’s interpretation of this old favorite was different from any than I had ever seen. Most singers get wilder and wilder as the scene progresses, tearing up the stage and acting out every scene of the B-movie the song describes. Joanie went the opposite route—she sang with full energy, but she got progressively more still, staring at an imaginary movie screen and losing herself entirely in fantasy. Where others explode, she imploded. We saw the real Dinah—a lonely, unhappy woman clinging to the silver screen as an escape. </p>
<p>Bill started out on good behavior, honoring all of Bernstein’s written rhythms and harmonies. But around page 5, he suddenly substituted a jazzy Bill Evans-ish chord for the Bernstein original. Michael and I looked at each other with shock, horror, alarm—and delight. We half expected the floor of Tully Hall to open and swallow up the piano. Soon more Bolcom emendations followed. With Bernstein sitting fifty feet away, each of the younger composer’s rewrites hit Michael and me with the force of an electric shock. </p>
<p>Bernstein was warm to Joan and Bill after the performance, with no mention of Bill’s creative reharmonizations. “He came up to me, grabbed my cheeks, and shook my face, like an aggressive Jewish uncle,” Bolcom recalled. “He told me, ‘Yeah, I heard that little ensemble problem on the first page, but you guys got back on—because you spend so much time in bed together.’” Bernstein went on to praise Bill’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience—“Oh, it made me cry. And you did something I wish I’d done in my Mass—you gave people a pee break.” </p>
<p>A year later, Lenny would be celebrating the end of the Cold War on international television, and a few months after that, he would leave this earth. But that night, my own internal Berlin Wall came down as I heard Bolcom have his way with Bernstein’s music. To hear one of my idols joyously toy with the music of another idol—at Lincoln Center!—opened my mind more than any book, any Norton Lecture, any master class could have done. I’m not done learning from these two giants; I’m not done playing their songs. And I’m not done loving and appreciating them with all my heart.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005089
2016-03-03T21:22:09-06:00
2017-01-16T08:30:12-06:00
Seventeen at 70
<strong><img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/188311/a2893ce5dee45dfe6c75f92a9d24c5b1b813f9b3/original/17-70captions.jpg?0" class="size_l justify_right border_" />Symphony Magazine (July/August 2008)</strong><br>The "Generation of 1938" - 17 remarkable American composers born in (or almost in) 1938 - were feted with a festival of their music at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood in 2007.<br><br><a contents="Download the PDF" data-link-label="" data-link-type="url" href="http://williambolcom.bandzoogle.com/files/219356/17-70.pdf">Download the PDF</a>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4052613
2016-03-03T21:21:52-06:00
2016-03-03T21:21:52-06:00
2008: A Big Year (New York Times)
A feature story and interview by Matthew Gurewitsch published February 24, 2008<br><a contents="Download the PDF" data-link-label="New York Times - Bolcom article (2008)" data-link-type="file" href="/files/229095/New%20York%20Times%20-%20Bolcom%20article%20(2008)" target="_blank">Download the PDF</a>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005287
2016-03-03T21:21:40-06:00
2016-03-03T21:33:53-06:00
The Unrepentant Eclectic
<p><strong>An Interview with American Composer William Bolcom by Christopher Wright </strong><br>AdventuresInMusic.biz sat down with William Bolcom and asked him, among other things, what's wrong with music today.</p><!-- more -->
<p>CW As a Composer, you've worked with in both classical and popular styles. You concertized with American ragtime composer and pianist Eubie Blake and studied under French classical composer Darius Milhaud - Milhaud called you "a gifted monkey"! What did you take away from each? </p>
<p>WB Where could I begin? They were both positive forces and each in his way gave the lie to the distinction of pop versus classical, as each used elements of both. Same with me. i have very classical textures and harmonies in my Graceful Ghost rag (written in remembrance of Bolcom's father) and a sort of regretful business in the slow movement (Adagio Lirico - a lamenent for his mother) of my Sxith Symphony. </p>
<p>CW You've been criticized, like George Gershwin before you, for being 'not quite serious.' What will it take for composers who cross over and work in popular styles to win unquestioned respect. </p>
<p>WB Composers like (the late comedian) Rodney Dangerfield, never do get respect. Sometimes they are honored when they are safely dead, but art music is probably the least glamorous of all the arts. </p>
<p>CW You've wriiten for solo piano, chamber ensemble, symphony orchestra, theater, opera, ballet, chorus and vocalists. Out of hundreds of works, which two or three are you most proud of? </p>
<p>WB That changes from time to time. Which of them will survive. I don't know. most composers' music disappears when they die. Right now I'm just delighted that my Songs of Innocence and of Experience are out on CD on Naxos. For 20 years, I was sure it would nevers come out on disc! I refuse to think, however , that everything else I have written is less important, as some have said. It could just as easily be true that the Songs will be regarded as less good as everything else in the future, There's no way to tell. </p>
<p>Many years ago, my wife Joan Morris and I got to know the once-very-famous William Saroyan (Amernian-American writer and playwright). Many people just blank on his name today. We once took him to dinner in Paris. Afterwards, we went to a friend's house where I played some of our recorded music for him. He listened respectfully. As he was leaving us he said, "Art is what is irresistible." </p>
<p>I'm still chewing on that. i think it means if something of mine isn't irresistible, it won't last because it won't be needed by us. knowing that I can't be around to see if my stuff lasts has given me such a huge sense of relief. No lobbying or politicking for my own work will make it any more or less irresistible. In the end it's the performers who decide what they want to perform, and in the long run they will play what they really want to hear.My music has done reaonably well up to now without any any publicity or buttonholing performers or owing favors to anyone on my part, It will either hold up or it won't. </p>
<p>CW To me, you're like the American composer Charles Ives. Some what you write is riotous like him and he also had a way of juxtaposing unexpected styles in his pieces - two marching bands crossing each other's paths in a symphonic work, a mexican variation on 'America" - Was he an influence for you? </p>
<p>WB Of course. </p>
<p>CW The wide range of styles in Songs of Inncoence and of Expeeriencce, stemming from Blake's use of his entire culture - from high-brow to low-brow - has been much discussed. In your setting of the Songs, one finds country & western, the blues, Broadway, Russian, Jewish, hints of Mahler, neoclassicism, atonality, even a reggae anthem dedicated to Bob Marley. But a couple of reviewers say there is a unversial harmony underlying the entire work. What are the unifying elements? What makes the piece hang together? </p>
<p>WB I'll quote Louis Armstrong. When asked what jazz is, he said, 'If I have to tell you, how can you ever know?' A piece works or doesn't work on its own terms. Explainable music has no independant life and dies when the explinations is forgotten. There is now single formula underneath the Songs, not that people won't keep looking for one. </p>
<p>Each of the choices of style grew out of my readings of the peoms. many of them sang to me immeadialty. I often resisted what I was hearing at first - The Shepard, for instance (country & western). Bu the choice was so imperative that I gave in, in that case and many others. So maybe the unity of the Songs is really in the poems. Going at it the opposite way - making a multi-stylistic piece by picking the styles first - is exaclty 180 degrees the wrong way to go. </p>
<p>CW What is the musical language in the dissonant parts? It doesn't sound typically atonal or 12-tone (where all 12 black and whitte keys in an octave on the piano are used before any is repeated). is there a system or did you follow your ear? </p>
<p>WB I used note-aggregates not tied with the 12-tone system but closer to interval series. In my music, a series of, say, a fourth, aminor third, a major sixth etc. is used in a row, but in wither direction, up or down. But a combination of several series use common tones so theres is never an artificial equal distribution of notes. Thus, hierarchies are set up - some notes are repeated more than others and tonality is used i greater and lesse degrees throughout. This allows one to follow even the dissonaunt parts easily. Als, one can flow in and out of the straight tonality if ones avoids the entropy of total atonality <br>But composers always follow their ear, even in strict 12-tone, of they're any good. Ther's a famous story about two students of (Pierre) Boulez - I knew them both very well - who found mistakes in his row-counting. Boulez just saild, 'that proves i'm a good musician!' </p>
<p>CW A couple of th Songs of Innocence sound to me like attempts at serious music that a child might write (Infant Joy and, especially, On Another's Sorrow). Things are not quite right. </p>
<p>BW Bingo! That was very true in both parts. </p>
<p>CW That was conscious on your part? </p>
<p>WB Oh my, yes. </p>
<p>CW Well you succeeded admirably because the feeling of a child having a go at composition got communicated very effectively. Later, when the Songs of Experience start, the mood darkens. In the text, tygers replace the lambs and childhood play gives way to misery, murder, revenge, and a dark love that destroys - all the complexities and despair of adult life. Musically sweet songs of innocence give way to disjointed melodies with odd leaps, at once more profound but less accessible. The disjointed melodies are not anything you can easily hum or remember. How does somebody who likes hummable melodies learn to appreciate disjointed melodies like this? </p>
<p>WB I guess you have to live awhile to make sense of the more complex music. The poems, to start with, are less 'musical' in the Songs of Experience, if you notice. Life now refuses to be oversimplified. One must grow up - as our country had better soon, before we screw up even worse - and it's damned hard and unpleseant work. Unlike TV reality shows, there's no prize for anyone at the end. In fact, there's no end to growing up. "Cruelty has a Human Heart" is the epiphany that comes with realizing that we are both good and evil. Without the acknowledgement of our dual nature, we can't continue. </p>
<p>So the melodies grow out of the text. In Experience, the singsong settings are left behind and the melodies get knottier and or abstruse and go where they go because that's what fits the text. </p>
<p>CW I love the story about the audience member who confronted the director at a performance of your stage work Dynamite Tonite and demanded, "it's not an opera; it's not a musical comedy. What is it?' Similarly, the Songs of Innocence and Experience are not supposed to be oratorio, some say. But what kind of song cycle uses chorus (throughout) and spoken word (The Tyger and A Poison Tree)? What do you call it or do you label it at all? </p>
<p>WB It's probably and oratorio, but it certainly is very differnet from something like Handel's Messiah. You tell me what it is! </p>
<p>(I am an unrepentant eclectic" - William Bolcom, 1986) </p>
<p>CW In the 1980s, you criticized the academy (typical university music department) for its "reign of terror" insisting on atonal dissonance to the exclusion of everythig else. Total atonality is an idea that's essentially gone nowhere in the its 100 years of existence. It's my impression that nothing's changed in the academy in the last 20 years. But you're the professor, have things gotten any better? </p>
<p>WB Not in most places, unfortunately, and the same is true of much of Europe. But things have gotten better elsewhere with the return and rise of the performing composer. Four young products of our Unniversity of Michigan Music School come to mind - Derek Bermel, Carter Pann, Gabriela Frank and Daniel Bernard Roumain - but there are others cropping up here and there. A perfoming composer will transform sterile style presepts and find what;s useful in them. Twelve-tone is a perfectly useful disciple if not followed slavishly. What really killed music in academe were the bullies there, more than the musical systems. The bullies overbelieved in the virutes of the nontonal systems, usually because they didn't have real musical ears themselves. Or, they had so tied themselves in knots with their notions, that whatever musicality they had once possesed had fled. Worse, they commenly coerced their students to write the same way as themselves, which in many cases results in the unlistenable crap you find played a SCI conferences )Society of Composers, nc.), for example. </p>
<p>CW Do you agree with Leonard Bernstein in his lectures at Harvard in the 1970s that the pull of tonality is too strong - composers will never escape it entirely? </p>
<p>WB Yes, there's no reason not to go to its outer reaches as far as one can. I have no patience with the treachly stuff so many composers are writing at the moment. It is like the 19th century late romanticism but without the fiber - virtual classical music. </p>
<p>CW It took a long time for the interval of a fourth, considered dissonant in the middle ages, to be accepted as consonant. Will atonality and 12-tone writing ever be popularly accepted as pleasing? </p>
<p>WB Yes, but only within a much-enlarged tonal context. that is to say, not by themselves, but as part of the larger fabric of vocabulary. Many of the atonal 'tricks' so common in the 1950s and 60s art music ended up being used in films, and there seems to be no problem of acceptance there for people if the atonal idiom helps intensify the mood of the film. So it's a matter of finding which techniques is appropriate to where one is in a piece, film, thater, opera, or concert music, and that is where intuition comes in and a musical language is built. It's a dead-end to impose a strait-jacket style to oneself. So may compsoers have done this out of misguided sense of 'morality'. </p>
<p>CW In 1997, you said that serious music was in decline and it looks to me like that's still pretty much the case. What will it take for serious music to get an audience again and when might that happen?WB We ghettoized serious music and seperated it from popular music. And we ghettoized the various catagories within popular music. With a few exceptions, everyones sounds musically tired to me at the moment, certinally the 'big hits'. Most movies feel the same way to me nowadays! I've never found pop and art music boring in general than just now. Without constant cross-pollination, as with flowers, all the musics are in danger of dying. Just think if we could all get rid of these catagories! </p>
<p>CW I agree with you about cross-pollination. As the Ken Burns jazz series argued, if it weren't for the contributions of the classically trained light-skinned blacks who weren't allowed to work in the white world, we wouldn't have jazz. you've been saying that the pop world is just as hidebound and stale as the classical world for sometime now. </p>
<p>WB Mariah Carey was a case of a voice who could do anything, but was given nothing but schlock to sing, that I ever heard from her. I wish I could get excited about Norah Jones, for another case, but it all seems musically deja vu to me. Why not plug into her farthers's music more, for example? (Her father is internationally known siutar player Ravi Shankar.) </p>
<p>CW You said in 1993, "If I've had any cultural mission, it's been to help American style find itself." Have you succeeded? </p>
<p>WB No, and if I really said that, I was a pompous ass. I've had enough trouble finding my own style, let alone America's. </p>
<p>CW You entered the University of Washington Music School at age 11. What advise do you have for child prodigies and their parents today? </p>
<p>WB Let yout kid grow up without having the onus of making a living doing music too early, but find a way where the child can follow its own star and get the needed training. I went to the University of Washington one day a week but regular school the rest of the time. Had I been sequestered in a purely music school and concert environment all the time, been educated by tutors while on tour, and not been required to deal with regular school the other four days of the school week, I suspect I would have had much greater difficulty today with the world's daily problems. I've never known a single person who was exploited as a child who hasn't later had severe problems in life. </p>
<p>(The famous pianist) Gilbert Kalish and I had the same experience as children, as we found out one day in conversation. Both our sets of parents were asked to put us on stage as kids and both said no, for which we thank them every day. Parents should know that any child who justifiably feels exploited will eventualy end up hating and distrusting them. Most importantly, I think it's cruel to the child. But the child should be able to give occasional concerts and explore the art as much as desired. </p>
<p>CW Where's a good place to begin with you music? </p>
<p>WB I'm probably not the best judge, but you coould try my 12 New Etudes for piano and the Fourth Symphony - both on New World, the Songs of Innocence and of Experience on Naxos, or the new Cabaret Songs - a live recording I did with my wife (mezzo-soprano) Joan Morris - on Centaur. </p>
<p>CW What's next for you? What worlds are left for you to conquer? </p>
<p>WB A new opera-musical in 2007, Idiot's Delight - for Joan, (pre-eminent ragtime singer-pianist) Max Morath, and the Milwaukee Florintine Opera. the Eighth Symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchesatra and Chorus for 2008. I'm pretty booked. To your question, what worlds are left to conquer, I remember a sad dinner a few years ago with Jerry Leiber, of the famous early rock writing team Leiber and Stoller (Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock, Love Potion #9, ect.), and old, old friend. He said, 'I've conquered three worlds - Broadway (with Smokey Joe's Cafe) and rock-and-roll.' (Where was that third world, I wondered.) "What's left?"Jerry's sadness really tore me up. there are times when it seems as if the past can drag you down by its sheer weight. </p>
<p>CW "Into the dangerous world I leapt..." It sounds like you've had a few songs of experience of your own. I can't thank you enough for being my guest. </p>
<p><em>Genre-hopping extraodinaire William Bolcom first became famous as a leader of ragtime revival of the 1970s. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, and numerous other awards, Bolcom received his doctorate in music fron Stanford University and has taught composition at the University of Michigan since 1973. He has recevied commissions from, among other, the Vienna Philharmonic, the National Symphony (in Washington D.C.), and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. his recordings are on Deutsche Grammophon, BMG/RCA, and many other lables. His performance of cabaret and American popular songs, (e.g., Gershwin, Porter, Kern) with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, are highly acclaimed.Bolcom's songs of Inncocence and Experience, his setting of 46 William Blake poems, was 25 years in the making. The Boston Globe called the two and a half hour work for nearly 500 performers (chorus, symphony, ensembles, and vocalists) "the greatest achievement fo synthesis in American music since Porgy and Bess." The Songs of Innocence were first published in 1789, followed by the Songs of Experience five years later during the 'Reign of Terror' following the French Revolution.</em><br><br>© 2005 Christopher M. Wright <br>All rights reserved - This material may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten, redistributed, resold, or manipulated in any form.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005094
2016-03-03T21:21:29-06:00
2016-03-03T21:34:20-06:00
On Writing "A View from the Bridge"
<p><strong>An interview by Terrence McNally </strong><br>December 21, 2002 </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong>They’re two things happened that might have happened on the same day. I get a call from Ardis. She said that Bruno has just come back Italy and she said, “Well now Bruno said, ‘Why doesn’t Bill do, what you call it in English, Uno Squardo dal Ponte?’” -- View from the Bridge in Italian. And I get a call from Arnold, Arnold Weinstein. Now often, it seems to happen a couple of times a year people have decided on their own recognizance to make an opera out of Death of a Salesman or All My Sons, or one of the other major plays. And they will send whatever music is already done to Arnold and Arthur. </p><!-- more -->
<p>Arthur will ask Arnold in to look at this thing, having been an experienced librettist. Arnold would be a good person to be able to say, “Yes, this is viable and so on and so forth.” The usual problem has been -- and I’m probably getting ahead of the story -- is that people tend to set the whole play. So, it becomes extremely burdensome and problematical but . . . So they were listening to yet another setting of Death of Salesman, and they both felt that it really wasn’t adequate and Arthur asked Arnold “Which of my plays do you think would be a really good opera?” He says, “Well, the one that comes to mind right away is A View from the Bridge. And a matter of fact, Lyric is looking for the next opera for us to do with Bill Bolcom.” And our mutual agent, Sam Cohen, had brought Arthur to hear some of my pieces in concert over the years. So he knew my work. I hardly knew Arthur at that point. So they called up and said, “Arthur and I want to do A View from the Bridge.” So I suddenly was drafted from two sides of the coin. What should I do? Now the big question is if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there’s got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while. There’s got to be something that you can do that will not just be a nice honor to the play, or the book, or the movie you’re dealing with, but some aspect that maybe can explore something that the play couldn’t do. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong>Or add a dimension. </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong>Yes. In this particular case it was the use of the chorus. And that was obvious right away. Over the years I had seen several productions of A View from the Bridge, including one from Actor’s Workshop many years ago. I remember one at Circle in the Square with Robert Duval playing Alfieri and, and then more recently there was one on Broadway with Michael Meyer. And the chorus can’t talk because once you have them talk it’s simply out of the budget. You can’t afford them (TM Right.) when, once they open their mouths. Well, of course in opera, you’ve got a chorus and they can’t only open their mouths, they can sing. So, that changes the role of Alfieri who’s the lawyer into a leader of a chorus. So the first thing I turned to Arthur and Arnold and said was, “Write me a lot of chorus, Give me plenty of chorus. Give me everything to make that chorus as real and . . ..” And of course, this delighted Arthur because he could have them speak. He suddenly could have them sing. He could suddenly have them, you know, be there in a real sense so that at the end of the whole play or opera they can converge, but as not just silent people but as people who had spoken. (TM It’s very effective too.) Yeah. Well that’s the whole point, so that’s why it was worth doing. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> But once you agreed on the subject, did it happen rather quickly? Did you see a way to do it? Did you hear a musical style, a vocabulary? </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> I kind of did. What I did was I started making all kinds of sketches. What I do when I’m dealing with a very big piece is that I have a kind of bin for it. And I just throw in these little bits of ideas I have. Kind of like a big morgue. And it, finally when it’s high enough, I can start thinking about what the first page might sound or look like. And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come. But, until that could happen, it would take a couple of years. I also had outstanding commissions to take care of. But Arthur and Arnold gave me a first draft of the first act, maybe in about, maybe a year after we had decided this would be the next opera. (TM Right.) And, I still sat on it for a while. And then the second act came too, and I also sat on it. But, this was, of course, attendant toward many changes as it went by. I’m a very, kind of an open-ended person with Arnold. We both have been willing to change all kinds of things. And he has tune ideas, I have word ideas, and after forty-plus years of collaboration it’s awfully hard to tell where one person ends and the next one begins. So, there’s that sense of that kind of cohesion which we’ve always had. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> But you did begin with a full libretto? </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> I did begin with a more or less full libretto. At least I had the first act and then I had the second act and so. And over and over, the same uncanny thing would happen. I would find myself, not necessarily always assigning these little bits of music for here or there, but all of a sudden something would fall into place and it would be exactly that. The most uncanny thing was when I was getting toward the end of the second act, and I realized I needed an aria for Marco, the older brother of the two Sicilians who are the illegal immigrants, because it seemed to me necessary to have something from him. We had only heard of Marco very little throughout the whole play even. And you see that his menace at the end of the first act where he raises that chair and he comes after Eddie. (TM Right.) But you haven’t heard from Marco. So, I called up Arnold and I said, “Can you write me an aria for Marco before the last scene?” He calls me back in three days and he said, “Will you allow me to call Arthur about this?” And I said, “Will I allow you? Of course,” And Arthur came up with the aria in three days. I took it back to my morgue and looked at the sketch and the sketch had written two years before fit exactly the words that Arthur had just given me (TM Extraordinary.) for this aria. And this sort of thing happened, it must have happened a dozen or so times in the writing this thing, that somehow we had all been enough on the same wave length that something as specific as that would happen and it did. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> For an audience that’s going to be tuning in next week, would you like them to read the play before the broadcast? </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> Well I don’t think it would hurt to read the play. There’s enough of the connections between the play and the eventual opera that I think it wouldn’t hurt to clarify what you’re going to hear simply by having a good idea of the basics of it. It’s a very simple, straightforward story. It could be told in a page and a half. I always think of Giovanni Verga or Isaac Babel, one of those devastating page and a half stories that, you know, (TM Right.) out of which, in the case of Verga, there’s the famous opera Cavalleria Rusticana comes from a Verga story. And it’s a kind of thing that you could do in a page and a half one of those, you know, pages and a half that just burn because they’re so short and they’re so sharp. But, what happened with, of course, with A View from the Bridge was -- and I think this was one of the reasons it was a more successful play in the second incarnation -- is that the characters became farther from a kind of a thumb-nail sketch toward a fully realized character in each case. You have a Beatrice who is just only hinted at in the first version, suddenly she becomes a very important person. Enough so, for example, that we felt in the second version, which we’re hearing here in New York, that I wanted to have another aria for Beatrice. Again, Arthur accommodated us and gave us a new one. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> An aria which I did not hear in Chicago, obviously. (WB That’s right. It’s called “When am I going to be a wife again?” It took that one particular line.) Line, I remember from the play, yes. </p>
<p>WB And added to it, and gave you much more of a sense of her realness and her needs. Catherine Malfitano, who sings this particular part has told me, I remember when I called her first, she said, “Why are you adding this thing?” And then later, when she started working on it (TM Which is unusual, singers are . . .) Most of the time they say “Thank you, I want more.” She said why are you adding this, and I said, well you’ll see and then she got to know it and she understood later. She said, “You know I’ve got a big aria later.” which I had made, as a matter of fact, out of a little two-person scene between Beatrice, her character, and Catherine the niece, and I just took out all of Catherine’s answers. And that turned out to be an aria which is called, “Was there ever any fellow that he liked for you?” And all I had to do was just take out Catherine’s “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe” whatever they all were. And there was your aria. So she said, Catherine, “You made it possible for me to deal with two subjects instead of both at the same time.” One of the subjects is “Why am I not having a good marriage with you, Eddie?” which gives us time to do this for this new aria, and the next one is “Catherine, you’ve got to leave the house.” So she didn’t have to do both jobs at once. (TM Right.) Which made it far easier for her. The same was true with the one that we added for Eddie Carbone in the scene with Alfieri the lawyer. Which actually came straight from the play. Arthur said you take it from here and go down there and it turned out to be setting exactly. I mean, I just took what was out of the play and just did it. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> Again, this is new music from the (WB This is new music . . .) Chicago. </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> And I’d actually done that also for in the second act for Alfieri which was the one he sings before Eddie comes to see him the last time before he goes off and makes the fateful phone call. And then again, I had also picked it straight out of the play because there are a lot of things that actually already cry for that kind of heightening of language in Arthur. So, there they were. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> I know this piece was directed by Frank Galati who I’ve had the pleasure of working with on two or three projects. And I know Frank always addresses the company the first day of rehearsal. And, I’m told that when he spoke to the company for these new rehearsals for the Metropolitan performances he was very eloquent about 9/11 -- the events of 9/11 -- and how it impacts on an audience viewing this opera for the first time. </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> Well, I think the thing that really struck him was the fact that we have this paean to New York, “The New York Lights.” And Catherine Malfitano has said that it was such a shame that people wouldn’t have had that aria to listen to, to more or less help them grieve and feel (TM How true.) that sense of immediacy and love for this town. And it’s just the warmth and the specificity of all those things, to talk to an opera group to tell them what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, which isn’t always common, that I think gave people a real sense of the theater behind this opera. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> But I think that’s a wonderful reference point in which to listen to the opera when it’s broadcast next Saturday (WB Yes.) of a part of New York that is gone and, and how we’re going to miss it and hear, hear this music in a very different way now. (WB Right.) Well, thank you so much for taking the time and great good luck with this piece and I look forward to it traveling successfully around the world, not just these shores. </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> Well, I only hope for that and it seems to be already happening with Dead Man Walking. You’re all over the place now. </p>
<p><strong>TM </strong> Well, congratulations to us both. </p>
<p><strong>WB </strong> Well, that’s great. (<strong>TM</strong> Thank you.) What a pleasure.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005273
2016-03-03T21:21:15-06:00
2016-03-03T21:34:35-06:00
An Update on Virgil Thomson's "The State of Music"
<p><strong>The Henry Russel Lecture at the University of Michigan</strong><br>11 March 1997 </p>
<p>Few writers on music have been as colorful, as astute, or as infuriating as the composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Chief music critic for the late, lamented New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 through 1954, he used his bully-pulpit to increase public awareness of the newest American music and our best young native composers and performers. He also shamelessly used his critic's power to obtain performances of his own music and to settle scores in the music world in the most highhanded way possible. He certainly indulged in some of the "old-American" set of prejudices that can also be found in the writings of a close counterpart, H. L. Mencken. As with Mencken, however, the rereading of Thomson is usually worth the occasional wince. </p><!-- more -->
<p>It will be fun to cite some squirm-producing passages to give the flavor of his 1939 screed, The State of Music, the brilliance of which book was to get Virgil his powerful job at the Trib. (Note: his subject and mine will be art music only.) I claim some justice in calling Virgil by his first name, as we were friendly over a fair number of years; a brilliant new biography by the New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini,Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, documents very faithfully the special nature of that pettish but often charming person. Rereading The State of Music, including Thomson's 1961 updates, gave me the idea of using his short book as a foil against which one can contrast our current musical situation. (The word foil, in another sense, admirably calls up Virgil's combative fencer's mentality.) Much of what I say might seem as anecdotal and opinionated as Virgil's original; his and my separate perceptions of the state of music around us in two (actually three) epochs are bound to be subjective in great part. If our varying views seem sometimes unfair, if we pass over certain areas without comment or overemphasize others, please bear in mind that this is an area where complete objectivity is perhaps irrelevant. One cannot quantify the music world in hard terms, as with real estate sales or hog futures. </p>
<p>Perception in art often becomes reality, or so it seems. Thomson's little book and his Trib criticism give an exciting insight into the musical life of his time, wherein the values of the past were on the one hand challenged and on the other hand stubbornly retained by the same forces -- i.e., trained musicians. Clearly convinced that composers are the professionals and statesmen of the arts, Thomson generalizes about poets and painters from an elevated point of view in a scattershot, amusingly unfair manner throughout the book: </p>
<p>"The painter's whole morality consists in keeping his brushes clean and getting up in the morning.... As soon as the light goes bad his painting day is over. He thereupon refreshes his mind by making love to his model or quarreling with his wife, and goes out." </p>
<p>"They are strange little men, photographers, always a bit goofy and incommunicable.... Practicing the most objective technique known to art, they live a violent life of the imagination. They are sad, pensive, introverted, lead their lives in raincoats." </p>
<p>"Journalists are plentiful everywhere and entertaining too, full of jokes and stories. Only their jokes are not very funny and their stories not quite true . . . because nobody tells them the truth about anything." </p>
<p>About poets he is nothing short of scathing: </p>
<p>"What subjects . . . are available to the poet today? Practically none. Money, political events, heroism, science, mathematical logic, crime, the libido, the sexual variations, the limits of venality, the theory of revolution: the incidents of all these are more graphically recited by journalists, the principles better explained by specialists. There really isn't much left for the heirs of Homer and Shakespeare to do but to add their case histories to the documentation of introspective psychology by the practice of automatic writing." </p>
<p>And, in a passage that applies equally well nowadays to serious composers as to poets: </p>
<p>"They haven't even any audience to speak of. For some time now they have been depending mainly on one another for applause. Hence the pretentiousness and the high intellectual tone of all they write." </p>
<p>I won't even mention what he says about sculptors and architects. </p>
<p>Thomson was speaking in 1939 of a confraternity of artists who were scraping by on occasional commissions or the low but adequate salaries President Franklin Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA) accorded artists for work that was demonstrably in the national interest (this program died in the midst of the Second World War). It would be at least the late 1950s before painting would become big business in New York, which to a certain extent it still is (for example, Larry Rivers's recent big show netted over $2 million in sales, and this has not been unusual for him or several other lucky painters); before journalists could command big book contracts on the strength of their public recognizability; before poets began again to be performers after the New Criticism peer-pressure intellectual strictures of 1939 gave way to the Beat poets, Robert Thy's male-identity-crisis seminars, grass-roots groups like the Nuyoricans, and the various fruitful and lucrative interpenetrations between poetry and rock of recent years. </p>
<p>A 1974-based organization, Meet the Composer, established residencies for composers in fourteen major orchestras in the seventies and eighties, during which time there was an 85% increase in performances of new American symphonic works, and, through that snowballing effect, we composers finally began to receive commissions a little more commensurate with the labor involved in writing music. Too, after the Second World War, throughout Western Europe and Canada, the arts began to draw increasing state aid, and finally in 1970 the National Endowment for the Arts, grudgingly small though its stipends have been in comparison, at least began to give some American artists and arts organizations a little financial support. </p>
<p>Now I must talk particularly about composers, as composing is my field, and the bulk of The State of Music is about composers and composing. Some people will no doubt expect a discourse on musical style and esthetics; in this they will be severely disappointed. Artists rarely talk about art among themselves, unless preparing some sort of statement for the public; we talk about what matters -- that is, money, and Thomson's book speaks centrally to the way musicians survive. </p>
<p>In 1939 Virgil could exclaim that the theater was the most lucrative possible venue for composers; he felt that the use of music in films was still uncertain in its effects -- how would it interact with picture and word? -- but that serious theater (note: he seemingly did not account musical comedy as "real" composition) would be a surer meal ticket. My, have things changed! Today the theater composer has practically disappeared. In the early sixties it still seemed possible to make a good part of my living in stage music in New York; in fact I did do several scores for Lincoln Center, off- Broadway, the Yale University Theater, and several major regional companies like Minneapolis's Guthrie and Memphis's now-defunct Front Street Theater. Somewhere in the seventies most of this opportunity dried up, for me and pretty much everyone else. Three years ago I did contribute incidental music to an Arthur Miller play on Broadway, but the meager circumstances -- we could only afford a taped solo violoncello, played over loudspeakers about as sophisticated as your average college kid's dorm hi-fi -- were a far cry from the more sizable live ensembles we once could budget in the theater of only a quarter-century before. Film and TV composition has turned out to be a better living all around because of higher pay (if you're lucky, and you have a good tough agent), but in the U.S.A. film composers have been denied European-style performance royalties to this day, thanks to a 1900s sweetheart deal worked out, I am told, by the legendary Adolph Zukor in cinema's infancy that has never been overturned. </p>
<p>Where initial fees for film composers in Europe can be generally lower than what is paid here by the major companies for name composers, the state-run performing-rights organizations like England's PRS, Germany's GEMA, France's SACEM, and the others can guarantee good royalties for film composers over time in this area of composition. And European film composers' music evidently can be reused for their own concert music by the composer without undue hassles. Not true here -- it's the rare American composer who owns his or her own film score, as I can attest from bitter experience. What I really don't like about the profession is the following: As a film composer you are constantly on emergency call from the filmmakers -- they always think of you last. If you are successful at all in this field your life is not your own. You have to drop everything you're doing to hurry out the film score in a couple of weeks, and if you once or twice refuse a gig because of prior commitments, as I did, you're never called again. It is no wonder that practically no film composer I know of in the U. S. has much of a musical life outside of movie scores. </p>
<p>I do feel that, unlike 1939, when Virgil felt that the proper artistic balance in film between dialogue, picture, and score had not been reached, there seems to be an established role for film music today, perhaps for the better but more likely for the worse. What makes new film-music seem even more ancillary than it might once have been in the days of Copland, Arnold Bax, Ernst Toch, or Thomson himself -- all composers known for their concert music foremost -- is the fact that many filmmakers nowadays cut their films to various pieces of music already, using them mostly as a means of controlling shot-rhythm. These music collages are then supplanted by the film composer, often in similar rhythm and style to the dummy score the filmmaker cobbled together; more than once the work-print score I've heard in a film showing is every bit as appropriate as the one used for release. For many film composers it must be a little like having to write a dance score to a pre-existent choreography -- a no-fun endeavor, as you feel more like a cut-rate tailor than a composer. (I was one of several composers considered for writing music for The Exorcist; in the end William Friedkin used his own very astute editing score, which happened to include parts of George Crumb's terrifying string quartet, Black Angels. The Crumb became a huge record-sales hit by classical-serious-music standards.) </p>
<p>I have already mentioned that in the last twenty years commissions for art composers have significantly improved across the board -- at least until recent cutbacks. Much of this is, I feel, directly ascribable to a combination of events: the founding of several composers' organizations (heeding Virgil's 1939 call for such things), the National Endowment for the Arts' seed money and other financial help toward the creation of new works, and (as a sort of coup de grace) the Meet the Composer booklet Commissioning Music issued in the late seventies. In it was advice to a prospective commissioner as to how to go about getting a new work written, lots of other useful stuff for both composer and commissioner, and, most importantly, a price list with a sliding scale for various types of musical works -- chamber, symphonic, operatic, and so on. Finally both commissioner and composer had a hard set of figures to work with and argue around, a phenomenon that had not existed before, and those few pages have made almost by themselves an enormous difference in our income. In 1939 and still in 1961 there were only about five composers who could eke out a living by composing what is weirdly called "serious music" but might more appropriately be called "art music." There aren't that many more composers making their entire living from their art today, but the situation is considerably better. </p>
<p>It has never been for us a question of getting rich as some painters and authors and performers have. More than any stylistic reason, that is, whether you write difficult or minimalist or "accessible" (awful term !) or neoromantic music, this is why, in this mercantile society, art composers have the least visibility of the arts. Art music does not generate much money as a rule, and that is the bottom line in America. This is also the major reason why Virgil's influence on the field of composition as a critic (he never had much of one as a composer, by the way) did not equal, for example, Clement Greenberg's in painting. Virgil's review might praise or excoriate a composition, though he was usually kinder to new music than to new performers, where he could often be merciless, but such a rave or pan could have less effect on a composer's livelihood than critical consensus for or against a painter might. A painter has an actual painting to sell, something of value a buyer can take home and hang up and show friends; no such phenomenon exists with a composition. By contrast the composer in 1939 or 1961 wasn't making a whole lot to start with anyway from the composition; one was lucky to break even after copying costs (one still is in the majority of cases). We still don't make the kind of money successful painters or novelists do, and I doubt art composers in America ever will. </p>
<p>I mention this particularly as a warning to the generation of composers which follows mine; these are trying, sometimes successfully for awhile, to carve out more space for their careers than my peers did, but I fear there is a built-in limit to art music's importance in our society until someone figures out a way to turn a composition into "hard goods" like painting or sculpture. After all, where is this piece; where is the irreducible thing that is the composition? It's not really to be found in the musical score; that corresponds to an architectural drawing, which might have considerable value if by Brunelleschi or Beethoven, but probably not if by somebody around right now. With more and more composers using computer engraving, a new musical score will have even less intrinsic value. The composition is not really the performance. Nor is the composition the recording; that is a commercial unit purchasable by anyone, like a book or newspaper, and only in the case that the irreducible is the recording itself as a work -- say for example, the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -- does any piece of music begin to parallel the status of a new book on the market. An investor in a new piece has only the pleasure of seeing his or her name in the dedication; there is nothing in a new piece to sell. A new piece does not really have a clear place in our market economy. </p>
<p>If things are better for composers compared to only a dozen or so years ago, there is no guarantee this will continue in the light of the current private funding situation and the beleaguered status of the NEA. In the news is a just-created presidential panel dedicated to finding reasons why arts funding is dropping so precipitously on so many fronts; this might help matters, especially for the arts organizations, but it might be some time before individual-artist grants are reinstated by some body like the NEA. As private funding often followed the NEA's lead before that body was discredited during the Reagan and Bush administrations, there isn't any strong mentoring hand now in our culture to guide prospective private commissioners in the arts. </p>
<p>So I don't see a reason to expect that the current better money for new pieces will continue very long, even if things improve for the more salable arts. As a class, composers haven't really done all that well financially over the centuries anyway. Most of us have had to do something else for a living since the beginning, from Guillaume de Machaut's position as pogrom director for Louis XII, to Palestrina's mink farm, to civil-servant jobs like Rimsky-Korsakov's and Mussorgsky's; a superstar insurance man like Charles Ives is revered in that field by many people who have no idea of his status as a composer. Most of us have had to perform and/or teach to make a living; Brahms and Verdi a hundred years ago are among the few exceptions in the whole history, and even Copland and Stravinsky a few decades ago made whatever money they had mostly from conducting. </p>
<p>The point of all this monetary chatter is that nothing influences the shape of art more than the presence or absence of venues, and these are dictated in the U.S. primarily by finance. What we will be creating as composers in the future will largely be determined by the options available to us, and the traditional ones are clearly shrinking. A despairing young New York composer has sent me a list of recent cuts in services for people his age. A few years ago the National Orchestral Association, a sort of halfway house mostly for Juilliard and Curtis students who wanted to stay in an orchestra until a job came up, was a wonderful way for new music to be performed; I played my piano concerto with that orchestra around twenty years ago. The NOA is now gone, partly because the jobs at the outgoing end weren't coming up frequently enough, I suppose, and a wonderful venue for performing, reading, and recording new music (with performers about the same age as the composers) has disappeared. The Louisville Orchestra, which since 1945 recorded many American orchestral masterpieces unobtainable anywhere else, has recently reorganized in order to concentrate on the same thirty pieces of standard repertoire all major orchestras seem to be limiting themselves to these days. (It has to be admitted that the new-music concert audiences were often pitiably small; when my Fourth Symphony was done there a few years ago there were more people on the stage than in the hall, and I was told this was common.) The Louisville has now dropped its new-music performance and recording program entirely, and I sincerely hope that their recorded archive will all be preserved; this is not a certainty. Many American major orchestras like The Saint Louis used to have programs for young composers to hear a new score read in bits, then edited together in a tape for the composer's study; these are fast disappearing, as they do not make money and cost quite a bit besides. </p>
<p>Composers were the first individual artists to be cut from NEA funding. Meet the Composer has had to reduce its nationwide commissioning program from $500,000 to $200,000; its major composerships in residency were phased out five years ago, and the original agreement -- that when the MTC funds stopped, the orchestras would take up the salary slack -- has obviously not been honored. If one is an orchestral composer, it isn't encouraging to note that the San Diego, Sacramento, Florida, and New Orleans orchestras have gone under (the last two have since reorganized into a players' cooperative named the Louisiana Symphony). None of these orchestras performed much new music, which may be partly why they went under; orchestras that eschewed twentieth-century repertoire have had a worse survival rate. </p>
<p>"It's so much better for composers in Europe than here," I hear some young composers complaining, and I certainly felt that way during my Paris studies almost forty years ago. And, on the face of it, it does seem that composers and the new are more respected (and less interfered with) in the Western European democracies than they might be by the Jesse Helms types lurking throughout our own demented culture. But things have not always been so great over there for the composer as far as making a living goes; Thomson points out that Debussy, even after the huge success of his opera Pelleas et Mellisande, was still very broke until he remarried, this time to a richer woman -- and the money only lasted till her father disowned her! </p>
<p>State help in Europe for composers and other artists is mostly a post-World War II phenomenon; in contrast to the bleak financial outlook for European composers Virgil decried in 1939-according to him the American situation was at least marginally better then for us-certain senior European figures like Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen are among those who have, since that war, subsisted quite well on royalties mostly from state radio performances and the like. I hope that the next generations of young European composers will have some of the same luck, but I have doubts, for although the situation there for new music is generally still far healthier than ours in the U.S., European budget-cutters clearly have their knives out too. I recently helped judge the CBC Radio Young Composers Awards for what I am told will almost surely be the last contest; I am told also that CBC radio and television is cutting a third of its staff in April, and many draconian program cuts across the board are anticipated. Canada's arts programs are on a model much more similar to Europe's than ours, and I would not be surprised at happenings of this nature throughout Western Europe in the years ahead. There are plenty of indications. The recent French protest against Jacques Chirac's slashes in welfare and other state sinecures (including arts support), though temporarily successful, clearly only postponed even deeper cuts as bottom-liners spring up everywhere like mushrooms. This tendency will only accelerate if our own NEA's demise sets an example. And the big danger for European art is that, should state funding disappear, there is nothing like our already existing network of corporate funding and private sources over there to protect and feed the artist. </p>
<p>Are the arts executioners right? Can we not afford the arts anymore? We may, and rightfully, protest that arts investment by private and governmental funds pays off far better monetarily than almost anything else in the long run; former New York governor Mario Cuomo could easily back up estimates that for every dollar spent on the arts in New York, four dollars came back into the economy. This doesn't seem to stop the bean-counters' zeal to cut us out, and one is inevitably led to suspect a hostility against art and artists from government, at least in the U.S. </p>
<p>Perhaps this anti-arts climate-for such it is, and I'm not paranoid to say it, only realistic-has certain unlooked-for advantages. One of the drawbacks in state funding in Europe has been the fact that in many cases certain artists, and with them certain esthetics, become the favored ones in a particular country. What you do in Europe, if you are an ambitious composer, is get yourself on the ministerial staff and get your friends all the other influential positions; other ways than yours of making music can be then simply ignored or thrust aside. One chief glory of the best days of our own National Endowment for the Arts had been its relative imperviousness to the kind of art-politics and stylistic cronyism that has in so many cases, I feel, sapped the vitality of much state-sanctioned art throughout Europe. Our NEA never gave you enough money to feel it had the right to run your whole show for you. Nor did it arbitrate an approved stylistic course (compare the field of composition in France). All that some money from the NEA meant was that fellow artists who happened to be on the board that year-as I was several times in the 1980s before things got ugly-thought well enough of your work to give you some help, whether they agreed stylistically with you or not. The NEA, currently more and more truncated and possibly moving toward the guillotine, has only been effective for about a quarter-century of its thirty-odd years, and I guess we can survive somehow without it if we have to. We did before. </p>
<p>There is cold comfort too. The Puritan-based blanket disapproval of the arts, still so much a part of our national attitude, can have a freeing effect on artists: you don't owe the bastards anything! (It's wryly amusing here to quote Joseph Heller: "Government-particularly one as corrupt and philistine as ours- should not involve itself in the arts in any way.") Another frigid consolation: A few years ago it could be said that any American artist could present something shocking and get away with it because nobody in power cared-one was almost envious of dissident artists in the U.S.S.R. who were at least being paid attention to, albeit in a brutal way-and at least now people in power are noticing artistic protest (whatever good it does us or the cultural climate)! But let us hope that if the NEA survives it will be transformed. To prefer preserving institutions over helping individual artists as it currently does is absolutely the reverse of what should be happening. It's like spending lots of money on new farming equipment and eating up all your seed corn at the same time. My problem with destroying the NEA is that it will be a victory for those hostile to any art they can't understand-art that some lawmakers hypocritically lump together under pornography (which, if it were pornography, wouldn't have so much trouble staying financially afloat!)-and I don't want to live in a country where such pigheaded bluenoses continue to run things. We must change this climate, and soon. </p>
<p>Let me return to the phenomenon of the late-twentieth-century orchestra, for this is a perfect case of how the NEA's current policy of funding organizations rather than individuals does potential harm. The subject is important, as our schools of music and college-level conservatories are mostly peopled with students who are destined to play in orchestras. (This is not an area Virgil explored exhaustively in 1939; it was evidently still felt by most that the orchestra was here to stay as it was.) I have already mentioned that the orchestra residencies Meet the Composer started have practically all died since 1992; this is symptomatic of the suicide course many major orchestras seem to be on anyway these days. Instead of growing, the symphonic repertoire shrinks as big-time conductors spend less time residing and working with their main orchestras and guest around most of the year, or have too many major commitments at once. The non-standard repertoire won't grow as long as worn out players, in 52-week, 250-concert seasons, are required to show up eight times a week for concert or rehearsal. If they sue for sanity and ask for only six "services," this inevitably reduces rehearsal time and thus any serious musical exploration. </p>
<p>Note also that, except in percussion, the so-called modern orchestra hasn't really transformed its disposition since the First World War (eighty years!) and thus is no longer a microcosm of the music around it as in the past. Young people, for a while beginning to explore concertgoing-often to hear young, living composers-are now staying away again from the major symphony concerts, as ultraconservative symphony boards return to the bad old practice of vetting the repertoire to purge music they aren't familiar with, and hiring conductors who will go along with their tried-and-true "tastes." (Is this the end result of all those music-appreciation courses college kids have had to take, where you are told to believe without question that the works chosen for study are the greatest, as if you were locked in the auditorium during some insane fundamentalist harangue? If so, Virgil's attack on the "music-appreciation racket" was right on target.) The orchestra has also long ago fallen into the same topheavy administrative bind as has academe and almost every other large institution today. (For an extreme example I am told that one celebrated orchestra, made up of around 104 players, has a staff of around 120.) Having to aliment all that administration seems, as with college tuition, the principal reason for the major symphony orchestras' enormous increase in costs (the proof is that when this staff was reduced, as at The Saint Louis, most of the crippling deficit went too). </p>
<p>A grant to the major orchestra as it is presently run is all too likely to sustain its inertia rather than encourage needed reforms. Not only do we need to pare down the administrative staff in the orchestra, we need to rethink the orchestra itself. I am only echoing Ernest Fleischmann, the outgoing executive director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, when I say that we need to find a way to transform the orchestral concept to embrace the enormous explosion of instrumental culture and excellence in the rest of the music world. Fleischmann wanted, a decade ago, to open up the L. A. Philharmonic's description to include the best musicians of any stripe-jazz, rock, electric instrumentalists-in the Los Angeles area. Many classical musicians disagreed violently and still do, of course; now conductors like Leonard Slatkin have come to agree with him. </p>
<p>I know that many people get incensed when I advocate inviting saxophonists, electronic instrument players and the like-in fact any excellent, musically literate instrumentalists with evolved techniques-to the ensemble (and I know why they object; I share their love for the rich legacy of music for the present orchestra, so little of which that orchestra plays nowadays). And it has to be agreed that an arbitrary, unthought-out mixture of non-classic and classic instrumentation (as found for example in pops-concerts charts) usually just sounds cheesy. But I fear that not allowing our premier culture-defining instrumental ensemble to reinvent itself as it always had until 1914 will simply kill the orchestra in the long run. Here is Leon Botstein, in the recent Musical Quarterly orchestral issue: "As the economist William Baumiol demonstrated, the orchestra is increasingly vulnerable and obsolete-looking when it is considered, directly or indirectly, as an economic entity. We are influenced not only in perception but also through use of language by the reigning ethos of marketplace success and economic efficiency. Relative to practically every other item in our consumer world, there are no downward expense patterns. The computer, the long-distance telephone call, the CD-not to speak of food and clothes-are part of an economic pattern that tends to drive costs down." My own theater experience has shown how "downward expense patterns" have reduced the numbers in Broadway pits from 40 players to 22 to 11 and finally, for straight plays, to a prerecorded tape. This is not necessarily an insuperable limitation (though soul-destroying), but cutting this far down on expenses on all fronts, sets, music, lighting-as regular theater is forced to do to survive-cannot help but modify the nature of what you do. How much of modern theater sounds and looks increasingly tacky and impoverished, unless it's an imported British megamusical; and look: Sunset Boulevard has just closed, losing 40% of its investment. The only thing that has not allowed such reductions in personnel in a symphony or opera orchestra up to now is the same rigidity that sends them back to a tiny portion of a hundred- year-old core repertoire; here at least that intransigence is a blessing. But as everyone in the world knows, you don't need thirty-two violins to make a big sound anymore. You can make an almost totally satisfactory big-string texture with a couple of live fiddlers in front of a sampler (thus putting thirty other musicians out of work), and the fact you can do that fairly convincingly may become as irresistible for the moneymen in the classical business as it has for their cohorts on Broadway or in jingles (now, I am told, less than a third of studio musicians are working than just ten years ago). Already various striking opera orchestras have been threatened with replacement by four guys on samplers, and someday the administrative bean-counters will get away with it. Then watch out: if this happens to opera, I fear there will be little to protect the symphony. </p>
<p>To try to preserve anything we cherish in our culture, we must take into account that thing's need to change and develop. If composers and musicians were to get there first, rethink the orchestra before the moneymen force such reductions, we could transform the ensemble into what we want (rather than what they want, which is just to make money, pay people as little as possible, and to hell with whether the result is any less good). When I orchestrated my Songs of Innocence and of Experience, I did a rough demographic analysis of the instrumental students at our University of Michigan School of Music. In 1981 we had a shortage of strings (things are much better now); we had plenty of brass and percussion; we had and have world-class saxophonists (which allowed me to fulfill the recommendation in Cecil Forsyth's 1914 book Orchestration, that is, to add saxophones to the orchestra for a better melding of woodwind and brass sound); and there were and are plenty of excellent students who have a rock background in electric guitar, bass, violin, and keyboards. The orchestral additions I called for in Songs of Innocence and of Experience have sometimes made life a hell for standard-orchestra personnel managers ("whom do you call? this isn't my area!" they scream at me), but despite this difficulty the work has had a dozen performances since the 1982 premiere (there are others in the offing), and for something involving close to three hundred performers this is nothing short of amazing. </p>
<p>Audiences are ready for this kind of development in our musical life; they are ready for a transformation of the pop music sound and structure too, as the pop world is just as hidebound and has become just as stale as the classical world (a whole other subject I have discussed elsewhere). Perhaps, with the precipitous drop in concert tickets and CD sales in the classical world, and a similarly flat and declining situation pretty much across the board in the popular-music industry, now is the time to reinvent the world of music, starting with how that world is organized economically. I believe I can say with some pride that our own School seems a bit more poised to cope with these developments than most. But I think that a music school such as ours must do more: we must begin to study what changes in the music world are necessary and how to implement them. We must encourage the best individual artists in every field to push for these changes in the great musical institutions, rather than opt for funding the status quo exclusively as is now the case in government and private sourcing. And we must take it upon ourselves to study a possible financial restructuring of our country's musical life from top to bottom. </p>
<p>I have been mourning the lack of health, financial and artistic, in the symphonic world as regards the major orchestras. By contrast, there is a far happier picture in the burgeoning small-city and community orchestra scene. One of the surprising insights every National Endowment for the Arts panel on orchestras has come to is how difficult it is to tell performance tapes by orchestras like the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and similar groups, from those sent by the five major organizations. The excellent schools-of music graduates who couldn't get into the Big Five or didn't bother to try didn't all give up their instruments. What they have done is look at orchestra playing as only part of their existence: they play in chamber groups, pursue careers as soloists, and often become proficient in high technology industries, where their lifelong disciplined approach to their art can be translated to another job with great success. Instead of 250 concerts a year with a single orchestra, they may do twenty or thirty, a far more humane number. (The downside is that a player who geographically can be part of several regional orchestras at once, as is common in the North Central states, is still very hard put to make a decent living thereby; I hear of total yearly incomes of around $20,000, barely above the poverty level.) Community orchestras sound better and better nowadays; the players have more enthusiasm than their jaded major-orchestra counterparts as a rule, and Meet the Composer is still, at this writing, funding community-orchestra residencies for young composers right out of school where, as with the much-missed National Orchestral Association, players and composers are closer in age. Where the good community orchestras excel, and where the major orchestras have largely fallen down, is in their strong ties to their own communities. Just as the computer industry found it could exist independent of the megacities, our musical life can, if we strengthen the bonds between musicians and their immediate environments, be exciting and creative wherever we choose to live. </p>
<p>Our major objective now as musicians is to rebuild the idea of the audience, and this will not be easy in an age when the television set and the computer have become the chief window to the world for too many people. Add this situation to the market's ghettoization of audiences into slices of age groups and economic levels, and you have a recipe for fragmentation of society, personal loneliness, and alienation, and-simply put-our growing lack of ability to get along among ourselves. Recently The New York Times quoted soul singer Jerry Butler's explanation to the music industry for the slump in record sales: "We have gotten so sophisticated in our marketing that we have not brought the parents and the children to the table together. You have not joined history and the future together." Music is perhaps the clearest and deepest articulation of the fabric of human society, and that fabric needs repair. We all know how dangerous the situation is, but I believe schools of music can help us 'Join history and the future together," and the ideal of a true community that they foster must be our guide in the years ahead.</p>
William Bolcom
tag:williambolcom.com,2005:Post/4005285
2016-03-03T21:21:05-06:00
2016-03-03T21:21:05-06:00
The End of the Mannerist Century
<p><strong>by William Bolcom </strong></p>
<p>In March of 1996 the composer Donald Martino came under attack from the musicologist-critic Richard Taruskin, who in a New York Times article on twelve-tone composition excoriated Martino as one of its more perniciously academic practitioners.(1) All this only occasioned by the reissue, mind you, of a Nonesuch record of around twenty years before; it's as if someone, now, decided to ambush a prizefighter walking by for winning a controversial match in 1965.</p><!-- more -->
<p>The attack seemed certainly out of proportion for the occasion, and I rose to Martino's defense in print.(2) This eventually brought about a re-acquaintance between Martino and me; I'd known him in seminar in Tanglewood in 1966, and we'd seen each other at odd times, but this public crisis occasioned a pleasant correspondence between us. Don very kindly sent some of his own music, and listening to it confirmed what I had remembered — that here is not only one of the most tonal of "atonalists" but also a composer extremely musical and natural of utterance. The intellectual rigor involved with serial technique never exposes itself for its own sake in his work. But it is always there. </p>
<p>To summarize Taruskin's argument would take up more space than this essay can spare, but one can note his two main (though unrelated) points: that 1. Modernism's stranglehold on music has lessened, as it has in the visual arts and good riddance too; and 2. there is a lack of connection between Martino's super-controlled language and what Taruskin calls its "primitive and simplistic" expressive gestures. (One could easily attack especially the late Schoenberg for the same thing; Boulez's early-1950s essay "Schoenberg est mort" jumps on him for using Viennese periodicity and gestures - the very things that make a good performance of his music coherent if recognized and nonsense if ignored.(3) </p>
<p>Taruskin's screed against what is now anything but a current musical style — so many years after its hegemony — must come from a long-pent-up anger at what was, in its time, an almost fascistic doctrine of historical inevitability adopted by some serialists. One would think that a composer like me, a Stanford graduate student in the early 1960s who quickly became interested in ragtime, popular music, and simple tonal gestures, would also rejoice at the death of the dodecaphonic witch. It is wonderful now not to have to worry about two hundred composers looking over your shoulder disapprovingly if you dare to write a triad. (I remember dinner in 1965 in West Berlin with Louis Andreissen at the apartment of Luciano Berio, who was directing Boulez's Domaine Musical that summer — I was one of the group’s pianists. Afterward, Luciano summoned up the courage — with quite a bit of shared cognac — to sit down and play what would later become Wasserklavier, a rather sweet piano piece clearly in F minor. No wonder we needed so much cognac in that musical climate! This was heresy.) </p>
<p>We are now distant from those times, however, and the issues are too complex and far-reaching to imagine that we can simply reject twelve-tone, or any type of musical rigor. Whatever Donald Martino has had as a composer to interact with a discipline — whatever discipline — is essentially the same as any one of us needs in some form. Forty years ago the serialists held the greatest intimidating force in the small world of modern composition; then there was a terrific rebellion against many of its assumptions — I was certainly part of that rebellion — and now it is OK to attack all serialists, indeed all the new music of the period roughly between 1950 and 1975. And it is true that much ugly music of that time, written with the help of complex pseudo-mathematical processes, really doesn't need rehearing. Why is then Martino, for an example, worth separating from the crowd of so much shrill musical logical positivism? Because it sounds good, and not necessarily because of the tonal implications, but because there is a truly sensitive ear at work here, strongly imprinted with Renaissance chordal spacing and conterpoint and married to a Classical proportional sense; there is an epic power in some of his music, Paradiso for example, that draws me immediately to the world of my most beloved Italian so-called primitive painters. (The art-history "primitive" classification has always puzzled me, particularly when one remembers that painters under its rubric like Castagno and Della Francesca were fascinated with newly explored science in their art, something one easily forgets while reeling openmouthed from the emotional power of, say, Piero's Arezzo frescoes.) What made Bach's fugues "truly poetic creations" to Schumann was only incidentally their intellectual brilliance; yet the structure of fugue cannot be discounted in the whole impact of the piece, and this is also true in the very best serial music of our time. </p>
<p>The twentieth century has been obsessed with language — the invention, the destruction, the arbitrary building, of language — and this may be the easiest way to grasp whatever modernism means. We have become enormously dependent on the word, the explicated concept, the published manifesto. For example, it took Frank Stella years of writing a large amount of obfuscatory prose to herald his stylistic change from minimalism to an exuberant maximalist style; I love the result as much as I did his earlier art, and I regret that he needed to confuse Artforum so totally in order to avoid being hooted down for his new work, but that's the world of today. </p>
<p>It seems, however, that schools of painters, composers, or writers in the more distant past were much more defined by geography than by precept. The landlocked J.S. Bach's excursions into French and Italian style, seen from the perspective of a pig-knuckle-eating Leipziger, can be understood as his — perhaps slightly desperate — attempts to break out of locale. And although many twentieth-century schools have defined themselves nationally (Jeune France of the thirties, De Stijl in current Dutch music), one senses an effort of will as each movement labels itself in the pursuit of a discrete identity, which reinforces their spiritual oppositeness to Bach's attempt at internationalism. </p>
<p>What we have called modernism in this century has usually been an art divorced from locale — although we recognize different aspects of modernism as being rooted in particular cities and countries — and whatever can be called pre-modernism had hit several crests and valleys throughout these hundred years. Periods after our major wars often have been the times when artists wanted to start over from scratch. Perhaps the major reason for Arnold Schoenberg's relative silence betweenPierrot lunaire and the dodecaphonic works of the twenties was the First World War, and the twelve-tone system, like the post-Webern efflorescence of imposed musical procedure after the Second, may have been a source of needed comfort after those ordeals. (Bach's fascination with order has been thought to stem from the Pietistic hunger for control after the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, even though that had been a considerable time before - changes were slower in that era, one supposes.) </p>
<p>I think the major difference in art movements today from those of the past is in our overwhelming need to publicize; it is ever so much greater because there are so many artists, schools, factions around us now that it is impossible to keep track, and whoever shouts the loudest is the only heard - until someone else shouts even louder. This has escalated our need for polemic, for self-advertisement, for marketing, to unprecedented levels, and our own horn-tooting abilities grow every day as Web pages sprout all over cyberspace. The danger in sprouting rhetoric about art is that one day one might come to believe one's own words, and that is the beginning of the end of that artist's vitality. Any artist has a modus operandi. We understand our own way of working well enough to be able to continue, but we can't understand the whole picture; thus our attempts to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others are hobbled by our final inability to know what's really going on in us, and that’s probably what saves whatever is valuable in our work from dying out totally. </p>
<p><strong>1. Manner vs. Substance </strong></p>
<p>I am often saying nowadays that ours has been a Mannerist century. Mannerist periods are known and recognized throughout art history more often than in music; they are moments when the how of art overwhelms the what, and they are often rich times, full of promise, new ideas, and invention sometimes seemingly for its own sake. Although the usual notion is that Mannerist periods in art come as transitions between the great stylistic epochs, I don't find that Mannerism in music necessarily coincides with our music-history notion of period. We consider Nenna and Gesualdo Renaissance composers, and Monteverdi an early Baroque one; yet these three and their common or contingent decades share the instability of musical upheaval in certain ways not shared with those preceding or following. (I've always wondered how one can lump Monteverdi and Bach together in the same bin, as music history texts insist.) One could rightly term the turn of the seventeenth century Mannerists (bridging our usual Renaissance and Baroque classifications), one reason being that their music still shares the power to shock - a quality shared with the best Mannerist art (from Piero di Cosimo to Fuseli) and architecture. </p>
<p>What is the distinction between moderism and Mannerism? Modernism is really a subset of Mannerism, involving principally the shredding of past references, but usually we are talking of the renunciation of terribly recent references when we look at the great expanse of history. (Remember that the isms of our time are mostly the children of concepts less than two centuries old.) The Mannerist impulse in architecture is stronger in Antonio Gaudi than say, Philip Johnson (no matter how many stylistic hats the latter has worn in his long career), partly because their assumptions are different, but much more because by the time Johnson appeared, so much ground had been broken by Gaudi, the Secessionists, and the Bauhaus that the newness of it all had diminished somewhat. What fun it must have been in 1900, for example, to be the first to try out things with film, to know that no one could possibly have done it before! Film today can do anything — the technological breakthroughsof Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, so stunning a few years ago, elicit yawns today — and this is symptomatic of the end of Mannerist periods. </p>
<p>What was once new and frightening is old very suddenly. Having spent so much energy on how we're doing something, we become aware of the fact that what we're doing feels meaningless. This mood is intensified by our recalling the sound of our own shrill voices hawking our wares, hawking ourselves, trying to be noticed - what was it all for? Why did we have to ally ourselves with Serialism, Minimalism, Neo-this and Neo-that, now that our self-labeling in the pursuit of identity seems so hollow in retrospect? Our disgust with our recent past has led to a wholesale rejection of music of that past. Add to this the sense of glut - book publishers and record companies are finally cutting down on numbers of releases because there is so much stuff around that consumers are tuning out-and it is no wonder that, with our boredom with what is now shouted as new, we are not necessarily wild either about what was new a few decades ago. We are getting tired of Manner; what we crave is Substance. </p>
<p>Reception & Politics </p>
<p>But Substance needs manner to express itself. We depend on the pathfinders of the past who found disciplines that would become our vocabulary. And this is the whole history of music, from technique to technique, from organum and Ars Antiqua to the New Complexity. The point is that time and usage have eventually always transformed the found disciplines, by a natural process of wearing away of inessentials and the gradual disappearance of underlying dogmas, into language that we could use something to say something. To throw out what is useful in our century's exploration is to cripple our future. We are not, I expect, going to be as obsessed with process as eastern U.S. and California university composers of forty years ago were, and thank God. But what I hope for fervently is that, in future, musicians will absorb a portion of our twentieth-century disciplines in the same way as we study sixteenth-century counterpoint and eighteenth-century harmony today. We do not, for instance, configure isometric harmony from the tenor in the same way Zarlino did, but we use the chord-forms he describes in much the same manner, and we have felt the meaning in sequences of these chords. Is this meaning imposed, evolved, or what? Our musical structure could all have been otherwise - there have been so many historical accidents down the long road to our time - but for some reason we have agreed on musical meanings in our culture to a surprising extent. What is also amazing is that music we have produced - at least that of the past-often carries significance to cultures other than our own, and we are finding that music from elsewhere means something to us in musical language (and musicians from elsewhere) hadn't anticipated. </p>
<p>All this seems to indicate that, having conquered vast new territories in musical language, we must now reconquer them using intuitive means. What this involves is paying attention to how a musical effect affects us as compsosers, and then deciding whether it will become part of our musical vocabulary. This is wildly different from the cult of originality that has been a tenet of much of the twentieth-century Mannerism. The best artist has often been perceived as the most separate stylistic from all others, and this notion usually is an indication of our blindness to how much that artist really did owe to what was around. (The so-named post-Webern era was largely predicated on our misapprehension of Anton Webern; far from being as divorced from history as many postwar composers had wished, his music turns out to be deeply rooted in both late Romanticism and the Renaissance. There is a famous description by pianist Peter Stadlen of hearing Webern play his new Piano Variations for the first time; Webern pedaled through the huge silences and employed wildly romantic rubato throughout, a far cry from the white-coat-and-stethscope Webern performances by Robert Craft we grew up with in the sixties.(4) (SEE APPENDIX BELOW) </p>
<p>In the end we may be alone as artists, but we can't avoid our time, either by eschewing the ephemeral in the interest of eternality or by trying to elevate the ephemeral to something it's not. What we can revel in is the enormous breadth of musical vocabulary open to us, now that we are in touch with so much of the surrounding world. I do feel however that our mistake in how we perceive multiculturalism had been to accept distinctions between styles as they are presented to us, by either the artist or the hype surrounding the art or both. (Distinctions are surely there, however, and not recognizing or invoking them flattens out the rhetoric of any art.) In every one of the musics around us are elements that can find commonality with other musics, and their collision and merging are the stuff of musical meaning, because they expand communications (just as Bach's espousal of French and Italian elements reduces his own musical parochialism). This marriage of musics eventually leads to a broader understanding of ourselves and love of others — I truly believe this — but I also note that enforced juxtaposition of style and elements, in order just to make a big bang, doesn't seem to have much power any more; a deeper link needs to be found. </p>
<p>There are thoughtful critics who bemoan the recent lack of innovation in music: Where are the Stravinskys, the Messiaens, the Xenakises, the Nancarrows? It must be admitted that at the moment many younger composers are churning out a lot of neo-Romanic treacle, much of which it seems very tired to me, even though it is succeeding a little better with audiences than the stuff from twenty years ago. But there must be a deep emotional reason for such apparent regressiveness, as more and more composers have turned to past styles in an effort to communicate emotionally and spiritually — a pursuit that is common to John Tavener's embrace of Eastern Orthodox church music and George Rochberg's evocation of Beethoven and Mozart. In my own case as a composer, I've explored past styles of American popular music. “Why are we doing this?” should be the question, more than “Should we do this or not?” It's very easy to take the position some critics have, that composers are doing this purely to win audiences in some sort of sellout. The fact is, however, that for many composers today the music we of my generation once felt impelled to write out of peer pressure doesn't mean as much to us now. (Some of us are ashamed of our earlier formalist effusions; now that was academic music, Professor Taruskin, not the juicy sensualism found in Martino.) As far as winning audiences to new music is concerned, I haven't noticed an enormous groundswell of public interest in it now that so-called argument goes, as the painter George Grosz once answered to someone accusing him of it (in his later, lyrical, less angry period, after he had given up images of scarfaced World War I veterans decapitating whores), "I've been trying to sell my soul to the devil for 30 years, and he hasn't even come around to make me a price!" </p>
<p><strong>2. What Will Survive? </strong></p>
<p>Will the future eschew whole sections of the past, in a sort of artistic holocaust? It isn't impossible — who could blame the young for feeling crowded out in our time? — and the impulse to destroy the past is one of the oldest in human society. (To see this, visit the Edfu temple on the Nile and see with what violence someone has brutally hammered out any bas-relief representation of the bird-god Horus.) We've been such packrats in our Mannerist century, with one hand pushing for newness at any cost, and the other hand just as avidly preserving and unearthing our history to be saved for ever and ever that I wouldn't blame some twenty-first-century artistic terrorists for setting fire to all those dead rivals to their own hegemony. I would have put the recent 100-best movies list issued by the American Film Institute and Taruskin's violent attacks on Prokofiev and Martino in the same bracket, that of an arrogant, militaristic need to weed out what is considered extraneous material for our supposed future benefit. Perhaps we can circumvent such arbitrary apocalypses by doing some weeding ourselves as artists. Of course we do this every day: as a composer I use various elements of music around me and ignore others, and even if this selectivity is a purely personal (and, alas, generational) process, it turns out probably to be my principal means of communicating to others and is perhaps what makes my music mine. But I can't say I hold out for much hope for avoiding something more violent in our future artistic history in a world-wide level, as conglomerate mass-market venues trample out human individuality increasingly each day, state and private support for non-commercial art dries up in country after country, and the artists of all stripes and persuasions censor themselves into a universal grayness. </p>
<p>We forget that the serious music of the recent past, zealous as it often was in declaring the death of tonality, of continuity, of whatever else it decided was dead, still depended for the most part on traditional instruments, conservatory-trained executants, and the concert hall ethic. That is possibly the reason, more than any stylistic rebarbativeness, that the Martinos, Wuorinens, Stockhausens, and Boulezes may mean little to succeeding generations: all of these composers took for granted some semblance of the traditional performer-listener axis, their attempts to violate it actually confirming an unconscious belief in it, so that now - when the whole equation seems to be changing because of electronic advances in world communication - their music may well be swept away with the global electronic tide. (That goes for my music too, yours, and most music in any time, despite our greater ability to preserve things.) </p>
<p>What will survive is what nourishes us emotionally and spiritually, probably to the detriment of what is merely interesting. What distinguishes Bach fugues from, say, the vast majority of ricercars and canzonas of the previous century is the emotional and spiritual meaning Bach carries to us through a form clearly derived from, and respectful of, its musical ancestors. One may regard the workings of his music as secondary to its spiritual impact on us. But Bach didn't; he clearly lived and needed the disciplines of the past to make his designs that our Mannerist century has happened upon will be of use to our own musical future, and this will be only if we find some music in our vast catalogue that we truly love, that we really need in order to go on living. "Art is what is irresistible," the writer William Saroyan once said to me, and I have yet to find a better definition of it. Only time will tell whether we have made irresistible music during our Mannerist century. I think some of it is, of any genres and provenances, and what we select will have a commonality and signification that will be the basis for the music of the world's future. </p>
<p><strong>Notes </strong></p>
<p>1. Richard Taruskin: "How Talented Composers Become Useless," New York Times, 10 March 1996, section H, p. 31. <br>2. Bolcom, Letter to the Editor: "In Defense of Dodecaphonism," New York Times, 7 April 1996, section 2, p.7. <br>3. Reprinted in translation as "Schoenberg is Dead" in Boulez, Notes of an Apprenticeship, trans. Herbert Weinstock (New York: Knopf, 1968), 268-76. <br>4. Peter Stadlen, "Serialism Recoinsidered," The Score 22 (February 1958): 12; cited in Hans Moldenhauer, in collaboration with Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of His Life and Works (NewYork: Knopf, 1979), 484. </p>
<p>==== </p>
<p><strong>APPENDIX </strong></p>
<p>Correspondence between Anthony Stadlen (nephew of Peter Stadlen) and William Bolcom, February 2012 </p>
<p>Feb 12, 2012 <br>Dear Mr Bolcom, </p>
<p>Could you kindly correct or retract the false statement in "The End of the Mannerist Century" that Peter Stadlen witnessed Webern pedalling in his Piano Variations? Stadlen explicitly stated in his accounts of being coached by Webern that, while Webern shouted, sang, waved his arms, stamped his feet, explained, wrote in the score, and conducted, amazing Stadlen by treating "those few scrappy notes as if they were cascades of melody", in his efforts to convey "what he called the meaning" of the music, he NEVER played. It was Stadlen's own pedalling that Webern either called for or "silently tolerated". </p>
<p>Yours faithfully, <br>Anthony Stadlen (nephew of Peter Stadlen) </p>
<p>===== </p>
<p>Feb 13, 2012 <br>Dear Mr. Stadlen: </p>
<p>My understanding is that it was Egon Wellesz, not Stadlen who heard Webern playing the Variations with lots of Brahmsian pedal through the rests (compare the E minor Intermezzo), described in an article in I think Journal of Music Theory or some similar periodical. I don't remember mentioning Stadlen in my original and it may have been "corrected" by an editor when the essay was published. I'm sorry for the error, whoever generated it. </p>
<p>Sincerely, <br>William Bolcom </p>
<p>===== </p>
<p>Feb 13, 2012 <br>Dear Mr Bolcom, </p>
<p>Thank you for your apology. </p>
<p>To clarify: </p>
<p>Peter Stadlen's account of Webern's preparing him for countless hours to give the first performance in 1937 was published in his article "Serialism Reconsidered" in The Score (No. 22, February 1958, pp. 12-27). Stadlen did not explicitly say there that Webern did not himself play, but in his "Essay on the Work's Interpretation" in his 1979 published score of the Variations, with Webern's markings in facsimile, Stadlen writes: </p>
<p>"...he never tired conveying to me the poetics of the work down to the minutest, most delicate detail (he never played)" [my emphasis]. </p>
<p>As for the pedalling, Stadlen wrote ("Serialism reconsidered", p. 13): </p>
<p>"He attached great importance to a conscious use of the sustaining pedal (although there are no pedal marks) not only as a means of varying the tone colour but also to make up for the angular thinness of the texture and to increase the sheer volume of sound in climaxes like [the one] in the last movement." </p>
<p>Roberto Gerhard published a sceptical response in The Score, questioning whether Webern really would have insisted on pedalling which appeared to contradict the staccato marks and rests in the climax of the third movement, but Peter Stadlen assured me personally (in the early 1960s) that his memory was correct. He repeated his account of Webern's pedalling requirements in various other articles, lectures and radio talks. And there is the evidence of his performance of theVariations at Darmstadt in 1948, of which a recording exists. There is further confirmation of Webern's desire for considerable pedal from a recording by Jeanne Manchon-Theis, who also studied the work with Webern. </p>
<p>Stadlen clearly re-stated his recollection of Webern's desire for pedalling in the 1979 "Essay on the Work's Interpretation", by referring to "the three passages in III, bars 53-55 where I distinctly remember my astonishment that he should have been prepared to sacrifice the explicitly indicated pungency of the quavers or, again, to allow the so meaningfully devised sequences of crotchet intervals to add up to climactic six notes chords." </p>
<p>In your essay "The End of the Mannerist Century", published on your website, you write: </p>
<p>"There is a famous description by pianist Peter Stadlen of hearing Webern play his new Piano Variations for the first time; Webern pedaled through the huge silences and employed wildly romantic rubato throughout... (4)" </p>
<p>Stadlen's famous description was, as I have pointed out, of what Webern required him to play. The "wildly romantic rubato" you claim Stadlen claimed Webern played appears to be a distant distortion of Stadlen's account in his Score article: "As he sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his feet in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music I was amazed to see him treat those few scrappy notes as if they were cascades of sound. He kept on referring to the melody which, he said, must be as telling as a spoken sentence. This melody would sometimes reside in the top notes of the right hand and then for some bars be divided between both right and left, It was shaped by an enormous amount of constant rubato and by a most unpredictable distribution of accents. But there were also definite changes of tempo every few bars to mark the beginning of 'a new sentence'." </p>
<p>It is clear that the playing, including the pedalling and the rubato, were all done by Stadlen, on Webern's instructions; and that Webern did not play. </p>
<p>Your "(4)" gives a reference not to Peter Stadlen's article, but to Moldenhauer's citation of it. From the evidence I have given above, it is clear that your statement is seriously misleading, and I would ask you to publish a correction. </p>
<p>I am copying this email to my cousins, Peter Stadlen's sons. </p>
<p>Yours sincerely, <br>Anthony Stadlen </p>
<p>===== </p>
<p>Feb 13, 2012 <br>Dear Mr. Stadlen: </p>
<p>My memory has been jogged. I was told by the editor of the collection this essay was printed in about Peter Stadlen, whom I had never heard of. My mistake was to incorporate the editor's version of the story without verifying it. Or I might simply have misunderstood; my apologies. </p>
<p>I think the central point of the episode was that Webern has been touted as the avatar of music non-dependent on the musical past -- which was of course the emotional need after World War II, when the desire was to circumvent questions about that embarrassing past, such as: was Wagner's music directly responsible for the Holocaust? This brought about a bloodless, clinical, aseptic style of Webern performance (cf. the Robert Craft complete recording) which was how everyone was sure it was to be played. </p>
<p>I'll never forget Milhaud's conducting the Webern orchestration of the Bach ricercar from The Musical Offering; he showed me the score, full of sighing ritardandos, super-romantic expression indications and the like. Hardly the clinical Webern we were all schooled in during the so-called post-Webern era. </p>
<p>Sincerely, WB <br>William Bolcom </p>
<p>===== </p>
<p>Feb 14, 2012 <br>Dear Mr Bolcom, </p>
<p>Many thanks for correcting your website. </p>
<p>You are, of course, right that Peter Stadlen's insistence on the truth of how Webern had wanted his Piano Variations (and other music) played was that Webern's Variations were being routinely played in a way that, as Stadlen said of Leonard Stein's playing of them in Craft's complete recording (in a 1959 review on BBC radio of that complete recording), "I know Webern would have regarded as a mere spelling out of the notes." He said Stein "could not be expected to divine" the nuances which could only be learned from "direct, detailed tradition". But Stadlen found some of the performances on Craft's recording admirable; for example, he said that Marni Nixon and Leonard Stein gave a "most sensitive performance" of the Opus 12 songs. (Here I am relying on memory. There does not seem to be a recording of Stadlen's crucial review of the Craft recording, but I know that I am remembering correctly what he said.) </p>
<p>Peter Stadlen also respected Boulez's efforts to do justice to Webern in performance, but he thought the post-war "total serialism" supposedly derived from Webern was based on a misunderstanding (he called it the "pointillist" misunderstanding). He was delighted when Boulez, on reading Stadlen's annotated edition of the Piano Variations, acknowledged (in an interview in The Gramophone) that he had always felt there was something he had been missing which he would now try to include in his own second complete Webern recording. Peter Stadlen said to me that Charles Rosen's performance of theVariations in Boulez's first complete recording was a "travesty". Boulez chose Krystian Zimmerman, who gave a more sensitive performance, for Boulez's second complete recording. (Although Peter did once use Rosen's performance of the second movement in a radio talk. He obviously thought that was all right. It was the more lyrical and passionate sections that were being unwittingly betrayed. </p>
<p>In that radio review of the Craft edition, Peter Stadlen made the important point that he remembered how moved he was when he heard Jeanne Manchon Theis play theVariations, because he knew immediately that she must have studied them with Webern. This is a crucial bit of evidence, because her performance and his stand out as totally different from all the other performances. Incidentally, a young composer, Jeffrey Trevino, did a detailed scientific analysis of the variations of tempo in the forty or so recordings of the Variations. Peter Stadlen's showed by far the most variety. </p>
<p>The composer Walter Zimmermann was at first not convinced by hearing a recording of a radio talk by Peter Stadlen of what Webern wanted. (I played it to a seminar in Berlin where Trevino was reporting his investigations of the recordings of the Variations.) Zimmermann had been taught the "detached" way of playing them by one of the Kontarsky brothers. But when I mentioned what Peter Stadlen had said about Jeanne Manchon Theis, and Trevino played her recording, Zimmermann completely capitulated. This was a crucial bit of corroborating evidence. </p>
<p>However, Zimmermann still argued that, nevertheless, we would "lose something" if we gave up the "detached" way of playing, that had become, he thought, a valuable tradition of its own, even if it was not what Webern would have wanted. </p>
<p>I disagreed. I said that Boulez and Stockhausen were passionate composers, whose music was full of feeling. The usual way of playing Webern was simply well-meaning but ignorant. Boulez's way was very sensitive, exquisite in fact. He had been putting all the feeling he knew how into his performances of Webern, from the beginning, and seemed only too pleased to learn from Peter Stadlen how to give still more. </p>
<p>With best wishes, <br>Anthony Stadlen</p>
William Bolcom