34 2014 Program Notes, Book 10
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
carlos kalmar’s
biography can be found on page 16.
Grant Park Music Festival 2014 Composer-in-Residence
William Bolcom
in many ways exemplifies the American
composer at the start of the new millennium. Bolcom has
taken his proper share of native and European training with
distinguished (mostly French) teachers, including Milhaud,
Messiaen and Boulez. His work has been recognized with
commissions from many noted performers and ensembles, a
Pulitzer Prize, recognition as the 2007 “Composer of the Year”
by
Musical America
, multiple Grammy Awards for his settings
of Blake’s
Songs of Innocence and Experience
, National Medal
of Arts and induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. He has taught
at leading conservatories (he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from
1973 until his retirement in 2008), and served as a critic, composer-in-residence and
adjudicator. He is known as an excellent pianist. It is his background outside these
factual entries, however, that makes him an intriguing representative of the modern
American composer.
Bolcom’s earliest memorable musical experience came not from his grandfather, a
lumber tycoon who raised money for the Seattle Philharmonic so that he could annually
conduct a program of marches — though he could not read a note of music. Nor did it
come from his mother, who continuously played classical selections on the phonograph
while she was pregnant with William in the hope that he would become musical by pre-
natal osmosis. Rather, Bolcom admits that his first musical memory came when he was
eight, during a visit to a music shop where he heard a recording of
The Rite of Spring
.
So intrigued was he by the music that he pleaded to take the album home. It was
duly purchased, and he spent hours in front of the phonograph imbibing Stravinsky’s
epochal masterpiece. It is significant, and typical of many of today’s composers, that it
was a recording — that dynamic marriage of music and technology — that opened the
world of music to William Bolcom.
After Stravinsky, Bolcom added the pioneering American iconoclast Charles Ives
to his musical pantheon. Other items were soon deposited in his increasingly eclectic
musical grab-bag—Berg, Weill, serialism, microtones, as well as a thorough grounding
in the great European classics. To all of these, Bolcom, like Ives, added a wide range
of American popular music: jazz, folk, blues, rock, pop, ragtime. He gathered what he
wished from this torrent of musical streams, and hammered it with a real flamboyance
into his own characteristic style. In 1965, for example, he received
second
prize in
composition at the Paris Conservatory for his String Quartet No. 8 (1965) — he was
denied first prize because the theme of the finale was in the style of rock-’n’-roll. His
Session IV
(1967) contains quotations from Beethoven and Schubert cheek-by-jowl
with some snippets from Scott Joplin’s rags. His first two operas (
Dynamite Tonite
and
Greatshot
) are rooted in the popular idioms of the satiric cabaret;
McTeague
,
premiered by Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992, is set in 19th-century San Francisco;
A
View from the Bridge
, commissioned by Lyric Opera of Chicago for its 1999 season, is
based on Arthur Miller’s play; his most recent commission for Lyric Opera, premiered in
December 2004, took Robert Altman’s movie
A Wedding
as its subject.
William Bolcom has confronted head-on the challenge facing composers in the first
years of the new century: how to respect the great traditions — European, American,
ethnic, popular — on which our culture is founded while creating music that is new
and vital. But every problem also offers an opportunity, and Bolcom, like many of his
colleagues, has created an exciting musical vocabulary that draws together the vast
sweep of music old and new into a synthesis for our time. It is a job requiring talent,
dedication, erudition, judgment, taste and even humor. With Bolcom’s distinctive
genius, it makes stimulating music that both reflects and illuminates our complex era.
