Word: bolcom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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...