Pulitzer prize and four-time Grammy winning composer and long-time professor at The University of Michigan, William Bolcom, visited Cornell for the performance of his First Symphony for Band and Orphée Sérénade at the CU Winds concert last Sunday. The Sun had the opportunity to chat with William Bolcom during his time at Cornell.

The Sun: How did you start composing?

William Bolcom: As a boy I was in Seattle, Washington and showed a kind of precocity about the age of four or five, actually earlier than that. My mother played a bit of piano. We were in a very musical house. I had been raised really with a lot of music in the house, not from their playing so much but with recordings and some radio. But also in Seattle there was something of a musical life, but it was quite provincial in those years. I’m talking about the 40s, during the war and all the rest of it. But at that particular point I evinced a strong piano talent. When I was about 5 years old, a whole group of people came from Los Angeles all the way up to Seattle, and they wanted to exploit me as a child prodigy. During the war, there was a great spate of child prodigies. You’d pick up a rock and there’d be someone playing Mozart with leg extenders.

My mother first thing would ask, “What would his life be like on the road?” They said I’d be touring. “Well he’ll have tutors and be taken from city to city;” “Will he ever have a chance to play with other children?” I may have been precocious as a pianist but I was still a little boy. And they said, “Well, I’m afraid that would be very hard for us to arrange.” 

And my mother and dad confirmed it with each other for about five minutes and looked to each other and said, “Well I wouldn’t do that to my dog.” So they didn’t put me out on the road. And I think every day I revere them in memory because I have seen so many cases of people who were, and it’s really very rare that they come out healthy in any kind of psychological sense. They feel exploited in many cases. They end up hating their parents for having exploited them.

But I was still giving concerts. I gave a whole recital at the age of eight in Seattle. Meanwhile I was playing for the troops. Now this during the war, and I was out there playing for the USO — an organization that is still going — playing for servicemen. But I was taking piano lessons and taking composition lessons with people in the University of Washington. At the age of 11, I began to go down one day a week to take lessons with the then-head of the composition department and the head of the piano department. I did so during all my junior high school and high school years. I went there and I got my degree, my first bachelors.

Sun: How did musical theater become a big influence in your life?

W.B.: Possibly because we went to a lot of theater when I was a boy. We went to all the productions, and I just loved what they were doing. But I’ve always had an interest in theater. I’ve always been involved with theater. I worked with a lot of musical theater people, and I just fell in love with the theater.

I could have made a pure career as a straight pianist. At my age, everyone had to play Rachmaninoff, not that I have anything really against Rachmaninoff, but I didn’t particularly want to play Rachmaninoff. And I thought, “I don’t know what I can add to the Beethoven sonatas. What can I do that I can give something to as a performer and composer?” I always had a strong interest in how you do something, the part that is not easily gleaned from the performance. What is it that makes a performance work that has to do with the oral tradition behind it?

Sun: As musical theater and other popular idioms became more important to you, how did this affect your compositions?

W.B.: Toward the end of the 60s, I began to feel very depressed about my strange career with being involved with popular theater one way or another, and began to be involved with a ragtime revival in the late 60s, and it had something to do with the re-discovery of Scott Joplin. All this had a big influence on me, and of course the Beatles had a big effect on me. Suddenly I realized that I had been very interested in classic popular American music. So how was I going to deal with this particular conflict?

For some strange reason I had no musical ideas at all, but after that, for some strange reason, I realized, “No, I don’t have to do one or the other. What I have to do is find how these different elements among my background related amongst themselves. And I began to realize there are several ways of doing this: juxtaposition of different kinds of styles and genres, but even more important, what was alike that I could find ways to make transitions from one thing to another.

I suddenly was parting company with the kind of unofficial like-minded people in the composition world. I couldn’t help it. My energies, I found myself divorcing myself from them. I was no longer necessarily acceptable to a certain part of the composition world. I still run into this problem, in this advanced age. There were people who actually told their students I was evil. I was out in California, at a major school, and I don’t know why they brought me there because the composition department didn’t want anything to do with me. A young woman had been there at that time she said, “Our composition teachers told us to stay away from you.” I was shocked by that. But then I also realized, “Well that means I’m also still dangerous.” Could be worse.

Sun: How does being a composer and performer influence each other?

W.B.: I became aware of the fact that being a composer and a performer were not the discrete, two separate disciplines that are often taught in academia and many conservatories, but something that will always be a link in your life. I realized that my continuing to be a performer and a composer was very important for me, because it gives you a sense of the audience, gives you a sense of what’s out there and who you’re working with and it also develops your own personal inner audience. I don’t ever think about how I’m going to please another person. I please the part of myself that is the audience part. I think if you perform that audience part, that part gets developed. If you look back in previous centuries, most of the people we still play were excellent performers and known for it in their time.

Sun: How did you become interested in composing for wind ensemble?

W.B.: The band world is something brand new to me. I had done very little band music. I never took it so seriously. What I would do was I’d write out a short score and give it to my copyist and let him stretch it all out. Especially in those days because my office was right next to the rehearsal rooms, and the afternoons when the band rehearsal, I’d heard what seemed this really ugly, stupid, inferior music, particularly when they tried to be avant-garde, it was just bad. I said, “Gee, I don’t want to have anything of mine on the program.”

What really converted me was my friend John Corigliano’s big piece, Circus Maximus, which absolutely blew me over. I’m a great fan of his music and we’re very good friends. And I thought, “Well if John can do this, I can do something myself.” Meanwhile, an excellent band director came in and he said, “I want you to do a piece for the Big Ten Conference of Bands, and we’ll premiere here at the University of Michigan. I don’t want you to just do a short score and send it to somebody to open it up.” I said “OK.” So I began to get over my awful prejudice against bands. And all of a sudden I realized one of the great advantages of these bands, unlike much of the orchestral culture, they give you plenty of time and rehearsal. You have weeks and weeks of time to work on things. It’s wonderful. It opens up a whole new level of interpretation, and the students come up to you and ask questions.

I think every composer has had experience with a jaded orchestra where they think, “Oh God, we’re doing this new piece because our grant requires us to.” And this happens all the time. It’s commonplace, and you get disgusted about that thing. So I think, “It’d be nice to have people who are really interested in increasing the literature, not dealing with a whole back log.” I don’t have to compete against Beethoven in this case.

I saw that there’s all this openness, I saw the enthusiasm, I saw that also people are dying to have new pieces because they want the literature. I suddenly said, “OK, I’m going to take this seriously.”

Sun: How do you teach composition?

W.B.: If anybody asks me how to teach composition, I say I don’t know. I think the first thing you need to find out is whether they [the students] have enough background in the musical literature cannon. I think it’s important to know Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin, and Schumann, and Handel, and all the people who were the basis of our music. You don’t have to necessarily be writing like them, but you find out what our culture’s coming from. So it’s terribly important to look at your craft. I also think it’s very much important to be aware of what’s around you. Many people today have a rock n’ roll background. They of course need to branch out from behind it but the one thing we never told them to do was throw that out. Because that’s part of your background, that’s going to be infusing your work anyways, why suppress it?

Sun: Where do you think music is heading? How do you think it’s changing since you first started?

W.B.: I think one of the things of course is that music is available so much more than when I was young. When I was a boy, recordings were rare, but you could go down to the university libraries and I would spend hours in there reading scores. I learned to oralize, if I could hear them in my head when I was reading them because a lot of scores weren’t available then.

Now of course, all that’s easy. You can put it up on your iPod. Everything’s right there. There’s such an explosion of all different types of pop music, and that has obviously had an effect on the younger composers because that’s what’s in their ears. Also I think the advent of the computer is bound to have a great effect. Where is this going? You tell me. I haven’t the slightest idea. It’s going to be where it goes. My old teacher Darius Milhaud used to say that the next great composer would have the effect on everybody because that’s historically what happened up till then. Today, I don’t know what a great composer is. There are many, many, many of us. And I don’t know how much any of them can take over the scene and have a really overwhelming effect in the way they might have had 50 years ago. There’s such a multifarious and much more fragmented type of culture.