Paul Bowles on Music

Finesse on the bellows

"I enjoyed what I did. But I wasn't eager to amplify it and become an important critic because I couldn't. I don't think I knew enough . . . . I never studied at all, that's the point. I think I'd have been a catastrophe."

Thus Paul Bowles, once a music critic on the New York Herald Tribune, explained why he abandoned the aisles of Carnegie Hall for the souks of Fez and Tangier. Bowles's was not a driven personality, but instinct seems to have guided him towards his eventual career as a writer who combined clarity and hallucinatory excess to startling effect. After the sudden, best-selling success of his novel The Sheltering Sky in 1949, Bowles became a cult author, compared to the Beat poets for his apparent use of cannabis in the creative process; and then a literary landmark in North Africa, where he remained until his ninetieth year.

By the time he joined the Herald Tribune in 1942, Bowles had already followed two artistic paths, as poet and composer. The decision not to be a poet was easy and came early. As a young American in Paris, Bowles was intimidated by Gertrude Stein's criticism of his work (she famously, and rightly, objected to his phrase "the heated beetle pants", remarking "Beetles don't pant") and found himself uninterested in improving what he had written. He could much more justifiably be described as a composer, producing in a mere fifteen years a considerable catalogue of stage, dance and chamber music which received some high- profile performances. He wrote theatre music for Tennessee Williams and Orson Welles; and his Lorca-based zarzuela The Wind Remains was premiered by Leonard Bernstein.

Today, performances of Bowles's music are rare, and usually linked to his celebrity as a writer. Rodney Lister, who devised a Bowles retrospective for the Poets' Theater at Harvard in 1990, found the music "fresh and rather lovely, but also, at just about every turn, displaying some technical infelicity". Again, the youthful creator had ignored professional advice (this time from his friend and mentor Aaron Copland) to study seriously, and preferred to live on his musical wits; which must have been considerable, to survive at all in the starry company he kept. It could be that the only sustained technical training he underwent in anything was his enforced education as a musical journalist during three hard-working years on the Tribune. In 1943 and 1944 he wrote 280 articles for that paper alone (as well as extended pieces for other journals and magazines). Most of them were "overnight" reviews, written in the forty-five minutes available between the end (or sometimes not quite the end) of the concert and the copy deadline.

Virgil Thomson, the most eminent of composer-critics, who had found Bowles his post on the paper, firmly insisted on the precedence of accurate reporting over personal expression in music criticism. Working within the demands of this diktat may have strongly influenced Bowles in the formation of his mature style, the chief delight of which is an unforced, clear-headed observation of extraordinary places. However, back in the concert halls of New York, rendering interesting accounts of humdrum symphony concerts via bald description posed a considerable challenge.

Bowles was a junior member of a distinguished team, often sent out to the musical equivalent of B-movies. He heard Francine Nola Marcus, a child accordionist, who "showed finesse in managing the bellows", and Lucie Bigelow Rosen, who played works by Bach, Beethoven and Debussy on the theremin. He missed Bernstein's sensational New York Philharmonic-Symphony debut standing in for the indisposed Bruno Walter, but was sent along to hear the same orchestra, under Artur Rodzinski, perform RAF Wing Commander John Wooldridge's composition A Solemn Hymn for Victory. "Dr Rodzinski previously had promised the English composer to play one work of his for every five enemy planes he shot down. Last night's performance was presumably in payment for the first pentad." He attended long but worthy recitals given by the League of Composers, and joined 7,000 other listeners in Lewisohn Stadium for a performance by Frank Sinatra "to the accompaniment of the orchestra and a chorus of hysterical feminine voices screaming in the audience".

The random survey of concert life and repertoire in 1940s New York offered by this collection is intriguing in itself. A lot of Shostakovich and Prokofiev is performed, along with frequent Rachmaninov, of whom Bowles doesn't approve. Stravinsky's concerts of his own work are a special event, although it is generally felt that his neoclassical style has run out of steam. Wartime sentiment may explain the relative absence of Austro-German repertoire, but several Strauss tone poems are played in quick succession (Walter and the Philadelphia Orchestra reveal Tod und Verklarung "in all its fascinating hideousness"). Mahler is still a curiosity, and a sinister one at that. Early music (Bach, mostly) is entrusted to the care of Leopold Stokowski and the Trapp Family Singers, although Ralph Kirkpatrick and Wanda Landowska are waiting in the wings. Bowles is rarely sent to the opera. Out of a parade of legendary performers -- Heifetz, Rubinstein, Horowitz -- he most admires Milstein and Serkin, but finds Menuhin cold and technical.

Bowles wrote carefully, exhibited good taste and made fair judgements, but only began to sound really cheerful when he was set free from classical music, and allowed out to hear an Eddie Condon concert or review the latest Blue Note release. Fortunately, Paul Bowles on Music includes a generous selection of his much more extended articles for Modern Music, an influential small-circulation journal mostly written by composers, and itself worthy of a reprint. In its pages, he wrote regularly about film music, examining the scores of new releases in massive detail (or so it will seem to today's filmgoers, who have little they can, or need to, discuss in this area). Above all, the real Paul Bowles begins to emerge in expert surveys of then almost inaccessible music; calypso, huapango, music from Cuba, Mexico, Morocco, Algeria. Clearly, while avoiding conventional study in his youth, he had nevertheless trained himself, through extensive travel, as an ethnomusicologist, long before this discipline officially existed. (Indeed, Bowles was later to work professionally in the field, recording Moroccan music for the Library of Congress, an expedition commemorated in two wonderful essays in his travel collection Their Heads are Green.) Enthusiasm and a love of music inform every paragraph:

"In 1931, I assisted at some evening music classes in Fez. It was so much fun that each year thereafter, on arriving in that city I made enquiries about them, but they seemed to have been disbanded for lack of pupils. That year there were about thirty, most of them at least middle-aged. I was the only nonparticipant in the music-making, which was led by an ancient gentleman playing a magnificent old rebab. Most of the men were playing modern violins whose guts had been replaced by silk strings, and they played them cello-wise, resting them on the floor against their folded legs. There were lutes, tambourines, and drums; no wind instruments. Everyone sang. Some pieces lasted as long as seventy minutes...."

Paul Bowles's fiction can seem rather lurid, and its (apparently improvised) violent climaxes are sometimes preposterous; but these impressions of music are a reminder of what always rings true in his literary work, namely a passionate observation of local life in the places he writes about. Ethnomusicologically-minded Bowles enthusiasts are possibly rather few in number, but they above all will appreciate this book.

Judith Weir is Visiting Professor of Composition at Harvard University

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