William Bolcom's best-known composition is a sprawling setting of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." In his liner notes to the Naxos recording, Bolcom wrote of Blake that "at every point [he] used his culture, past and present, highflown and vernacular, as sources for his many poetic styles."
Change "poetic" to "musical" and you have an apt description of Bolcom's music. Heterogeneity is the new catchword in classical music these days, but Bolcom was eclectic before eclecticism was cool. His stylistic range is wide: He is a master of both ragtime piano and cabaret songs. The "Songs" contain elements of jazz, country, and blues, among others, all synthesized in Bolcom's distinctive musical language.
"That's one of the reasons I felt such immediate kinship with Blake," says the composer by phone from his home in Ann Arbor, Mich. Yet he points out that for both poet and composer, "eclecticism" is an instinctive matter rather than a consciously adopted posture.
"To him it was all available. No one came up to him and said, 'Mr. Blake, you're an eclectic.' I didn't wake up one day and say 'Gee, I'd like to be an eclectic.' I've never thought seriously of trying anything else."
Bolcom's music will sound throughout Boston over the next two weeks. Tonight the Guarneri and Johannes string quartets will give the local premiere of his "Octet: Double Quartet." (It's a co-commission of the
The symphony, which will also be played at Carnegie Hall in New York, is dedicated "to James Levine for many years of collaboration and friendship." The two have known each other since 1957, when they met as students at the Aspen Music Festival. Levine has commissioned two previous works from Bolcom - most recently his Seventh Symphony, written for the MET Orchestra. That group, he says, "has a very amiable esprit de corps, which is not all that common. I think that's something Jim brings about, and it's really wonderful to see that."
As with the "Songs," Blake is the source for the text of the Eighth Symphony - in this case, excerpts from four of the "prophetic books." These books, which involve a rather tortuous mythology of Blake's own devising, are more forbidding than the "Songs," and Bolcom says that their tone affected the compositional style.
"There's a certain kind of high rhetoric that I tried to match in the music," he explains. "To a certain extent, I feel that music, if done right, can actually clarify a text. And how I emphasize, how I color behind it, is an attempt to get at the basic emotional atmosphere of the phrases, so that perhaps you can see where they come from."
Bolcom says that the symphony was surprisingly easy to compose, in part because he composed the opening - a dramatic setting of the line "Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burden'd air" - more than 40 years ago, when he was a graduate student at Stanford. That line is from Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," from which the symphony's final text is drawn: "For every thing that lives is Holy."
To Bolcom, that line is far from being just watery sentiment. In a recent issue of Symphony Magazine, he wrote that that idea "could not be more relevant to today's miseries: I do feel very strongly that America's shedding of a long, overprotected, and overprotracted adolescence is the only way toward our nation's survival."
"It's a culture that nurtures the infantile," he elaborates. "So our tastes are those of children, we think like children, we got into this last war as if we were children. We have a notion of machismo for handling the world around us . . . and that's a very bad image for us. It's going to kill us."
The Octet, which was premiered at the University of Illinois last week, has a less freighted program. In some ways it's concerned with the tension between the younger (Johannes) and older (Guarneri) groups for whom it was written. "The whole business is that over time they sort of come together into a group of eight instead of one quartet and one quartet," he says.
It's also Bolcom's homage to Mendelssohn's great Octet - also on tonight's program - written when he was all of 16. "It's one of the few pieces I know that makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up. Even Mozart at 16 wasn't as great as that. It's like angels wrote it."
Finally, there are the violin and piano pieces, which have proved to be among his most popular works. Bolcom speculates that may be because most of them were written with particular performers in mind. Whatever the reason, many of them provide focused snapshots of Bolcom's artistic persona, blending his love of jazz violin with a sophisticated and often astringent harmonic language. (American Double's performances on a recent CD are especially rewarding.)
Toward the end of our conversation, Bolcom mentions the Greek philosopher Archilochus, who famously distinguished the fox, who knows many things, from the hedgehog, who knows one great thing.
"And I'd have to say that I'm a fox," he says. "We need both of them, and there are wonderful hedgehogs. I'm just the other kind."
Guarneri & Johannes Quartets: 617-482-6661, celebrityseries.org; American Double: americandouble.com; Boston Symphony Orchestra: 888-266-1200, bso.org
A new H&H season
The Handel and Haydn Society has announced its 2008-9 season, which will feature tributes to its namesakes, Handel and Haydn. Both composers have milestone years in 2009, which marks the 250th anniversary of Handel's death and the 200th of Haydn's.The season opens in October with the return of conductor Harry Christophers, who made his H&H debut this season, leading a program of Handel anthems and excerpts. Principal conductor Grant Llewellyn conducts two programs, including a performance of Haydn's oratorio "The Creation" at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade in May. Artistic adviser Roger Norrington leads two intriguing Haydn programs: a concert performance of the rarely heard opera "L'anima del filosofo," a version of the Orfeo myth (January); and a wide-ranging selection of works Haydn presented during his time in London, including vocal arias and two symphonies (April).
Among conductors making their H&H debuts during the season are Richard Egarr, currently music director of the Academy of Ancient Music, and Paul Daniel, who conducts the Society's 155th annual performances of Handel's "Messiah" in December.
Tickets go on sale in September.
