Seattle native Bolcom bridges musical styles

CLEVELAND — A conversation with William Bolcom unfolds like much of his music. The American composer is engaging, provocative, almost gleefully digressive — delighted, in fact, to travel in unexpected directions that lead to fascinating perspectives.

The Seattle native revels in musical eclecticism, which has won him commissions from orchestras, opera companies and solo artists. His freshly inventive works also have garnered him accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize.

Bolcom, 68, has been smitten with a smorgasbord of musical styles since he was a child prodigy. He and his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, are specialists in turn-of-the-20th-century parlor songs and popular fare of later eras.

"I never had any prejudice about any kind of music," said Bolcom, whose work was featured this week at Baldwin-Wallace College's Focus Festival of Contemporary Music. "As Stokowski said, 'There's only good music and bad music.' "

Parents were careful

Bolcom's parents refused to allow their prodigy to be exploited. They made sure his schooling was normal, and he received excellent musical training. Composing happened naturally, an outgrowth of the boy's curiosity about the composers whose music he was learning.

"I always wanted to write," Bolcom said. "I started by using crayons. At the age of 11 or 12, I started writing [string] quartets. I wasn't any Mozart, but the quartets are pretty good."

His early composition studies at the University of Washington with George Frederick McKay and John Verrall taught him the rudiments of the craft. Later, he worked with two eminent French composers, Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen.

Milhaud took Bolcom under his wing, admiring the young composer's inclination to embrace all sorts of music.

Postwar composer

Bolcom came of compositional age after World War II, when composers were trying to forge individual styles. Although he never became a die-hard serialist, Bolcom explored the 12-tone system to discover other ways of creating musical cells.

"It allowed me the ability to be very simple, very tonal and to go to the remote [harmonic] reaches," he said.

His eclecticism wasn't embraced by everyone. When he wrote his first violin sonata in 1956, colleagues were upset by the amalgam of influences. But Bolcom never wavered in his desire to bridge gaps between the classical and the popular.

"I was interested in how various styles talked to each other," he said. "I wanted to make the interest by counterposing them. In his time, Mozart was put down for that. In the 18th century, most composers didn't have that priority, but Haydn had that mad sense of humor. He loved surprises. I feel a certain identity with him."

Bolcom's "Songs of Innocence and Experience," his acclaimed settings of William Blake poems, represent a stew of musical styles.

Like Haydn and Mozart, Bolcom has composed an extensive body of operas and symphonies. With Arnold Weinstein, his librettist of more than 40 years, he wrote "McTeague," "A View From the Bridge" [with original playwright Arthur Miller as co-librettist] and "A Wedding," based on the 1978 Robert Altman film.

Bolcom's next opera is an adaptation of Robert Sherwood's "Idiot's Delight," which will star Morris in the part played by Norma Shearer in the 1939 MGM film and ragtime pianist Max Morath in the Clark Gable role.

The curse of the Ninth

Then there's Bolcom's Eighth Symphony, a setting of excerpts from William Blake's prophetic books. The piece will have its premiere in February 2008 by the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Festival Chorus under James Levine.

Discussion of his Eighth Symphony brings up the inevitable subject of a ninth. Beethoven finished nine symphonies, Bruckner left his ninth unfinished, and Mahler died without completing his 10th. Bolcom, a longtime faculty member at the University of Michigan, is thinking of circumventing any supposed curse by composing his next symphony for band. He'd do so also because bands have more rehearsals than major orchestras.

"This is a way to avoid the 'Ninth-Symphony-I'm-Dead' thing with Bruckner and Mahler," he chuckled. "You get tired of public sight-readings [with orchestras], which is why I refuse to write concertos. They get short shrift."