William Bolcom

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February 24, 2008

A Big Year for a Full-Service Composer

By MATTHEW GUREWITSCH, NYTimes

AS an applicant to the composition program at the Paris Conservatoire in 1960, the Seattle native William Bolcom

churned out his regulation fugue and sonata movement on cue. But asked

to present what he was working on, he offered "One Little Bomb and

Boom!," a jaunty waltz from his cabaret opera "Dynamite Tonight,"

modeled on novelty numbers from the time of World War I. The lyric was

by the New York poet Arnold Weinstein, who blended classical learning

and jive with wicked panache.

"This is when everyone's talking about Boulez and Stockhausen and

the total chromatic," Mr. Bolcom said recently from home in Ann Arbor,

Mich., "and here's this popsy little number extolling the virtue of

bombs. It was so different. It was popular theater. Messiaen was there.

I'll never forget the bemused look on his face."

Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez

and Karlheinz Stockhausen: composers and teachers of towering

intellect, grandest of the panjandrums of a new music for the 20th

century. Mr. Bolcom took in their gospel with eager ears, but he was no

disciple. A far more kindred spirit was a composer Mr. Bolcom had

worked with in the United States, Darius Milhaud, by then an elder

statesman of the avant-garde. Milhaud wore his learning lightly, wrote

with ease in styles both popular and arcane and was never above

blending jazz, saudades or other exotic flavors into his spicy brew.

In 1965, when Mr. Bolcom submitted his String Quartet No. 8 for the

composition prize at the conservatoire, it placed second. He later

learned, he said, that only a sort of spiritual tune in the finale had

cost him the top honor.

But Mr. Bolcom's voice, like Milhaud's, is most his own when he is

speaking in tongues. His setting of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence

and of Experience" — for a symphony orchestra of Mahlerian proportions,

a slew of soloists and massed choruses — is encyclopedic in its embrace

of styles, from the mandarin modernism of his student years to barroom

ballads and reggae and other vernacular modes.

The great American maverick Charles Ives comes to mind, having

intimated immortality in collisions of hymns, parlor songs, military

marches and arias. But Ives left his "Universe Symphony" a shambles.

Mr. Bolcom managed to complete his maximum opus to huge acclaim.

The much-decorated American composer John Corigliano,

Mr. Bolcom's friend and contemporary, regards his fluency with a kind

of awe. "I envy Bill's chops," Mr. Corigliano said recently in New

York. "He's got such skills, such great compositional techniques. Music

flows out of him the way it flowed from Mozart."

Mr. Bolcom demurs a little. "Does it matter how long music takes

coming out?" he asked. "I just work a lot. Pieces germinate in my mind

a long time, and then they come out rather quickly." (The three-hour

Blake cantata, which took shape over nearly 30 years, was the

exception.)

In May, Mr. Bolcom turns 70, and the many performances in his honor

this year include what might seem an almost boastful number of

premieres. The Guarneri Quartet and the Johannes Quartet joined forces

this month for his new half-hour Octet: Double Quartet. Next month the

New York Festival of Song introduces "Lucrezia," based on the sex farce

"Mandragora" ("Mandrake Root") by Machiavelli, better known as the

author of "The Prince."

"A zarzuela as imagined by the Marx brothers," Mr. Bolcom called

"Lucrezia," referring to the popular Spanish variety of light opera. He

had the action transposed from Florence, around 1500, to a

"contemporary cuckoo-land Argentina that allowed me to write fandangos

and tangos."

On a grander canvas is his Symphony No. 8, nearly 40 minutes long, a

choral setting of prophetic texts of Blake, which scholars study like

the kabbalah. James Levine conducts the premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus at Symphony Hall on Thursday and the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on March 3.

"The passages I've chosen are the clearest and least burdened with

cosmology that I could find," Mr. Bolcom said. "I've been looking at

these texts since I fell in love with them at 17. I thought that maybe

they would make more sense sung than spoken. Singing spreads them out.

When I read these poems aloud, they make a weird kind of sense. But

people have gotten all 'aw, shucks' about reading poetry aloud today.

It's like listening to a bank draft. T. S. Eliot was like that. Blake is kind of a gloss on Handel. His prophecies are the arias of their time."

For decades, Mr. Bolcom has been a full-service composer, turning

out some 300 symphonic works, chamber pieces and songs. Other larger

pieces include the musical "Casino Paradise," a compulsively hummable

latter-day "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," and three

full-fledged operas, all commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago

and shot through with the spirit of American popular song. The

expressionist shocker "McTeague" (from the same Frank Norris novel that

inspired Erich von Stroheim's silent film epic "Greed") might be Mr. Bolcom's "Wozzeck"; "A View From the Bridge" (after Arthur Miller's tragedy of a common man), his "Cavalleria Rusticana"; "A Wedding" (after the Robert Altman film), his "Nozze di Figaro." All three have been revived by Indiana University Opera and Ballet, in Bloomington; "A Wedding" was heard earlier this month.

A glory of that score is the instrumental writing, which magically

evokes bird song, reflections in a mirror and the hazy consciousness of

a morphine addict. (A recurrent score marking is "fairy-light.") Social

dances of all kinds weave through as infectiously as the waltzes of

"Der Rosenkavalier." The cast of characters is large, yet each

principal is etched sharply: among them, the physician who made his

fortune buying and selling art by Pollock, de Kooning and Kline, whose

names become his witty refrain. (Miller and Altman helped adapt their

scripts, but the principal credit for all three librettos goes to

Weinstein, also the lyricist for "Casino Paradise.")

Mr. Bolcom's Symphony No. 9 is on the way, commissioned by 11

university concert bands. And his pace may soon accelerate, this being

his final semester teaching composition at the University of Michigan, where he has worked since 1973.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bolcom has been an academic, and few

labels scare listeners off as effectively as that one. Previous

university affiliations had been neither happy nor productive for him.

"In a world where the draft didn't exist, I might happily have gone

freelance in New York as a theater composer," Mr. Bolcom said, "but

when the Selective Service hounds came after me, academic jobs saved me

from having to kill Vietnamese (or help kill them). Michigan, where

being a complete musician involves keeping up your performing

abilities, was healthful in a way many places have not been in my

estimation for young composers. Despite academic pressures, we have to

remain musicians first and foremost, not verbal apologists for a

particular aesthetic."

Mr. Bolcom's vocal writing is catnip to singers of many persuasions,

from his third wife, Joan Morris, a cabaret mezzo-soprano, to the

veteran tenor Plácido Domingo, who gave the first performance of Mr. Bolcom's song cycle "Canciones de Lorca" in 2006.

"Not only is Bill's music wonderfully colorful," Mr. Domingo said

recently. "It is also completely logical because his melodic invention

is based on the cadence of the sentence. Like the great song composers

of the past, Bill is guided by the words. From personal experience, I

can say that singing Bolcom's music is a joy."

As a performer, Mr. Bolcom has proved similarly inspirational. A

demon at the keyboard, he made his name during the ragtime revival of

the late 1960s with his nimble hands and sparkling improvisations. In

the mid-1970s, the concert and recording team of Bolcom and Morris

began exploring American popular song, ranging forward and back from

the vaudeville period. Combining archival research and oral history,

Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris's scholarship is impeccable, but what

audiences take away from their performances is their contagious delight

in discovery.

Steven Blier, of the New York Festival of Song, said recently that

Mr. Bolcom and Ms. Morris's example changed his life. "My ethos about

what it means to be onstage in front of people, to give people

something with intelligence and heart and culture and depth, that

really comes from Bill and Joan," Mr. Blier said. "Their performances

were always so free. The spigot was just open. You could see what the

song meant when it was new, what it means now and what it just meant."

Mr. Bolcom's catholicity of taste set an example too. "Music doesn't

have to be thorny or academic or frankly unpleasant to be worthy," Mr.

Blier said. "Bill has always encouraged me not to feel guilty about

loving all kinds of music but simply to follow my own loves to discover

things and share them with people, which is what I think he did. He's

been a beacon."

In the worldview of Isaiah Berlin,

Mr. Bolcom knows just where he stands. "I'm the ultimate fox," he said,

"not a hedgehog. I can't help it. I don't know one big thing. I know

lots of little things."

[MomsMobley]

Bolcom "View From A Bridge" in the top five of American operas (#s 1 & 2 = Virgil Thomson / Gertrude Stein), believe it; I can't speak on these productions per so though Frank Galati is a brilliant director.