Bowles concert

It's been a blast to get back to Austin and play the Paul Bowles concerto with the UT New Music Ensemble. The more we play the piece, the more impressed I am with the freshness of the ideas and the forms. The concert is this Tuesday night at Bates Recital Hall and it should be a lot of fun!

Here is the program note I wrote for the concert.

Paul Bowles: Concerto for Two Pianos, Winds, and Percussion

The story of Western music is replete with great prodigies, but relatively bereft of polymaths on the order of Paul Bowles (1910-1999). Today Bowles is most known as a quintessential American expatriate author: living in Tangier, Morocco from 1947, he produced a great body of novels, short stories, and translations.  His 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, which dramatizes the expat experience of alienation in the North African desert, has appeared on "Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century" lists of TIME and Modern Library. But Bowles was also, since his teenage years, a composer, and he wrote music throughout his life. His largest projects were theatrical, including music for plays by Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams. Today his art songs are somewhat known, but his instrumental music is rarely heard.

The Concerto for Two Pianos, Winds, and Percussion was written in 1946-7, predating The Sheltering Sky by only a few years. On first listen its tone and affect are completely at odds with those of the famous novel, which creeps with a dark sense of anxiety and foreboding. By contrast, the Concerto effervesces with brash rhythmic energy, cabaret melodies crashing against one another, vibrant musical ideas elbowing for space. It seems nothing more or less than a grand evening on a Parisian terrace, full of songs, characters, clinking glasses. And yet at moments, in the rich ambiguity of Bowles' harmonies, still we find ourselves face to face with the mysterious and unknowable.

Bowles' stylistic reference points are familiar from contemporaneous works of Milhaud, Poulenc, and Stravinsky, but his manner of building long forms was unique. Eschewing traditional methods of motivic development, Bowles let each musical idea speak--or shout--for itself, and "develop" only through contrast and restatement. Bowles produced few extended concert works, and the present composition is his most ambitious in instrumentation and scope. This Concerto is perhaps the musical magnum opus of a brilliantly versatile creative mind.