Word: bolcom
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...Omnivore" William Bolcom likes ragtime and reggae just as much as classical music, so he writes symphonies and operas that can include just about anything...
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...
...Bolcom's concerto is indeed that. The composer is probably better known as the peerless accompanist for his wife Mezzo Joan Morris in their programs of American popular songs. But his spacious cantata on Blake poems, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, was in contention for 1985's Pulitzer Prize for Music and should have won. The concerto, although on a smaller, less ambitious scale, is typically eclectic in its welding of disparate musical materials into a distinctive, stylish whole. There is a vigorous first movement, which tips its hat to the opening of the Bartok Second Violin Concerto...