Where The Old Joins the New

By Otto Friedrich

While composing some madrigals 20 years ago, William Bolcom stumbled onto an odd coincidence: "I discovered that the funeral hymn Abide with Me and the wedding march from Lohengrin fit in perfect Irving Berlin counterpoint -- a funeral-marriage, Love with Death." This is not a discovery that would impress most composers, but Bolcom is not like most composers. So when the Philadelphia Orchestra performed his powerful new Fifth Symphony last week, the second movement featured, along with intimations of both Tannhauser and Tommy Dorsey, that bizarre wedding of Wagner and Abide with Me.

"If you mix popular and classical forms, it brings life to both genres," says Bolcom, 51. "By making them touch, something fresh, new and organic grows. I like the traditional and the newest culture coexisting in the same piece. The classical masters had that possibility -- Haydn is full of pop tunes -- and I want it too."

Bolcom demonstrated his eclecticism most spectacularly in his 1984 setting of all 46 poems in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a three-hour extravaganza that called for a rock band as well as a concert orchestra, plus three different choirs and nine soloists. The songs ranged from a haunting quasi-Renaissance madrigal to a smashing reggae finale. Bolcom should have won the Pulitzer Prize for that, but he came in second, then won it in 1988 for his 12 New Etudes for piano.

Born in Seattle, he started musical studies at the University of Washington at eleven, later worked with Darius Milhaud, both at Mills College and in Paris, and then earned his doctorate at Stanford. (On the other side of the lectern, he has taught at the University of Michigan since 1973.) But something about conventional composing left him dissatisfied. "I got tired of the aesthetics and doctrinaireness of it," he recalls. Two failed marriages made everything worse. "My personal upheavals made me question everything."

Questioning everything, he also reached out to everything. "I am an omnivore," he says. He fed on the Beatles, for example, and what have been called "the song jewelers": Gershwin, Kern, Berlin. "I liked this music. It satisfied something." He also discovered ragtime and helped spearhead its revival in the 1970s with a nonchalantly elegant recording of rags by Joplin, Lamb, Scott and himself. More important, he discovered mezzo-soprano Joan Morris and began accompanying her around the country in dear old ditties like Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May? They married in 1975, and still give nearly 50 concerts a year. "Performing this stuff with Joan had an enormous influence on my music," Bolcom says.

Eclecticism of this kind is not, of course, Bolcom's invention. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the Civil War-era virtuoso, wrote symphonies as well as show pieces. Charles Ives, whom Bolcom greatly admires, embedded folk songs in his massive orchestral works. Gershwin composed both opera and musical comedies, and in later years Kurt Weill, Virgil Thomson and Leonard Bernstein, among others, have distinguished themselves as musical magpies. Some think, in fact, that eclecticism is what is now fashionable in this unideological age, and that is partly what accounts for Bolcom's recent success.

Bolcom cheerfully quotes a colleague as saying that he is the only serious composer who drives a Cadillac. But he has worked hard for his popularity, and he still does. His tenth string quartet premiered last year, and Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax will tour four cities with his cello-and-piano sonata in May. Casino Paradise (an opera about a gangster "that's more or less like a musical") premieres in Philadelphia in April. Other coming works: a "baby opera" about Mozart's librettist Lorenzo da Ponte; a song cycle of poems by American women for Marilyn Horne; and a clarinet concerto for Stanley Drucker and the New York Philharmonic.

Now the Lyric Opera of Chicago has asked him to undertake Frank Norris' McTeague. Bolcom recalls that in his student days he improvised at the piano during a silent-movie showing of Greed, Erich von Stroheim's classic film version of McTeague. "I was bowled over. I thought, 'Jesus, this is an opera.' " The libretto is almost done, and the composer already has a fat folder full of musical sketches. "It is about sex and violence, passions and emotions," Bolcom says gleefully. And he notes, just as gleefully, that the story is set in the ragtime era.

With reporting by Nancy Newman/Philadelphia