At 80, Bolcom is busier than ever
Trying to pin down a stylistic profile for the composer William Bolcom is a mug’s game, a bout of Whac-a-Mole against an elusive and wily opponent.
In his music — a vast and varied catalog that includes symphonies, operas, chamber music and song cycles — the most ingratiating and accessible strains keep company with gnarled dissonances. Ragtime and tango, Mozartean pastiche and full-scale modernism all take turns at center stage.
The reason for this omnivorous but carefully controlled hodgepodge is perfectly simple, says Bolcom.
“I have a huge palette of things I want to express,” he says. “So I just take what I want. And then if the styles are different, I try to make sure they’re talking to each other as seamlessly as possible.”
Bolcom, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, was on the phone from the home he shares in Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife and longtime collaborator, the soprano Joan Morris. He was gearing up for a return to Northern California and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, where he was a regular presence during the 1970s and ’80s.
The second concert of the festival, on Saturday, Aug. 4, at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, will include a perfor-
mance of his 1983 Violin Concerto, with the Russian-born violinist Philippe Quint as soloist and Artistic Director Cristian Macelaru conducting. The piece, with its confluence of jazz and classical strains, is as representative a taste of Bolcom’s eclecticism as anyone could wish for.
In this case, though, he says he was influenced by the example of the Romanian American violinist Sergiu Luca, for whom the concerto was written.
“I got to know him in 1972 when he was first starting out,” he recalls. “Sergiu was a very fiery performer, and he was the first classical violinist I ever ran into who knew or cared about the jazz violin tradition. He befriended Joe Venuti, which is really where that whole tradition began.”
Bolcom even got a chance to partake in that tradition firsthand, one night in the mid-1970s at the famous New York nightspot Michael’s Pub. Venuti, he says, was performing and invited Luca to do a duet with him. Then the bassist, the great Milt Hinton, spotted Bolcom and Morris in the audience and invited them to sit in as well.
“So there we were,” Bolcom says with a delighted chuckle, “playing with Joe Venuti! And I guess he thought we were all right. So I ended up dedicating the last movement of the concerto to Venuti’s memory. It was important to me to write for someone who knew how Joe Venuti played.”
Bolcom has a plentiful store of similar anecdotes to draw on, and once he gets going he races through them one after another, a garrulous and almost breathless storyteller.
There are vignettes of New York life in the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic began to decimate the city’s cultural community. The second movement of the Violin Concerto is dedicated to the pianist Paul Jacobs, a close friend who died while Bolcom was midway through composing his “Twelve Etudes” for him. He’s wryly observant about the politics of musical academia, which he has mostly dodged despite teaching for decades at the University of Michigan.
Bolcom’s 80th birthday has been keeping him busier than ever, with performances to attend and commissions to fill (he’s in the process of finishing up a trio for horn, violin and piano for a September premiere). But as he’s quick to point out, being born in 1938 puts him in good company.
“There’s a whole crew of composers that are turning 80 this year — John Harbison, Joan Tower, Charles Wuorinen, Paul Chihara, John Corigliano — and we’ve been celebrating together for a long time,” he says. “When we were going to turn 50 someone said, ‘Oh a 50th birthday party is so sad,’ so we all had a 49th birthday party the year before.”
There were celebrations a decade ago, but they were a bit overshadowed by the astonishing centenary of Elliott Carter, who was still busily composing. This year, Bolcom seems gratified by the attention.
“It’s nice to know that people are still interested and enjoying what I have to say,” he says.
And if they don’t like one thing, there’s always something else that may capture their fancy. That’s one of the benefits of being as stylistically flexible, and determined, as Bolcom.
“You know, there’s that old thing from Archilochus, about how the fox knows many things and the hedgehog knows one big thing,” he says. “Well, I’m more of a fox, but with a hedgehog’s doggedness. I’ve always wanted to do what I wanted to do, and it’s fun to have different facets of musical life interact.”