Most composers of my acquaintance who have won the Pulitzer Prize say the main impact it has had on their careers is to increase the number of commissions that come their way. But for William Bolcom, who won it in 1988, that was no problem.
"All it did was make things more hectic," claims the 51-year-old University of Michigan professor. "As far as new commissions, I was already dated up to 1993. I only wish I had been able to get some of them after the award, so I could have more money."That award was for Bolcom's "Twelve New Etudes" for piano. Beyond that his catalog embraces chamber music, concertos, symphonies, song cycles, operas and, somewhere in the middle, his "Songs of Innocence and Experience" (after William Blake), a full-evening work for soloists, chorus and orchestra that was likewise nominated for a Pulitzer in 1984. Were that not enough, those pending commissions include an opera based on Frank Norris' "McTeague" produced in collaboration with his longtime associate Arnold Weinstein and director Robert Altman, to be unveiled in Chicago in 1992.
But the Bolcom most people know is not the composer or music professor but the pianist who, with his wife, Joan Morris, travels around the country presenting evenings of American popular song. To date that has resulted in 15 record albums and a schedule of between 40 and 50 concerts a year - something Bolcom admits makes the composing tough.
"One year we were gone every weekend between January and May," he recalls, adding that he had to learn to write on the road. "Finally I decided this was in a strange way not terribly different from the old guys, most of whom were performers. It was only a late 19th and 20th century notion that you had to be something of an absolutist - i.e., composers didn't perform and performers didn't compose. So maybe I'm sort of restoring the old definition of a musician as someone who does both."
Bolcom and Morris are also restoring to a great extent this country's appreciation of popular song at least as many of them were originally sung. And that is what they will be doing next weekend in two concerts with the Utah Symphony, the opening salvo in this year's Merrill Lynch Entertainment Series, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. at Symphony Hall.
With Christopher Wilkins on the podium, that will that will include six songs with orchestra, such as "Pineapple Rag," "Meet Me in St. Louis," and "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," as well as songs by what Bolcom calls "the big five - Gershwin, Kern, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hart."
And why Rodgers and Hart as opposed to Rodgers and Hammerstein? "I suppose it's a matter of personal taste," Morris reflects, "but I love the concision, punch and two-sidedness of Lorenz Hart's lyrics. You can be laughing one minute, then he turns it around and tears come to your eyes."
The Bolcom and Morris collaboration goes back to 1972, when they were introduced to one another as young performers in Greenwich Village. "I had been singing with a harpist, Jay Miller, up to then," Morris recalls. "Bill even wrote a song for us. But with a harp it was a little bit limited, mostly folk songs and Beatles numbers with some older tunes. Then later that same year a friend from Brooklyn College wanted to put together a conference on songwriters of the '20s and '30s and he called Bill for service. By then we'd done a couple of songs together at parties so Bill said `Why don't you let me and Joan Morris take a crack at it?' "
The resulting program generated not only a review in the New York Times but also invitations from first the Smithsonian Institution then a small college in Virginia. "One thing just led to another," Morris says. "We didn't even have management for the first year or two."
What changed that was the duo's first recording for Nonesuch in 1974, the best-selling "After the Ball - A Treasury of Turn of the Century Popular Songs." From the first, critics were impressed by the simplicity and poignancy of the singing, something Morris traces to the originals.
"I had done a couple of off-Broadway shows before then, one in particular, `The Drunkard,' in which everything was camped up. And every now and then I would bring along a Linda Ronstadt song to my singing lesson and put in a lick here and there. And my teacher, Federica Schmitz-Svevo, would stop me and ask, `What does the composer want here?' That got me to thinking."
Soon she and Bolcom found themselves going back to the original sheet music for some of these songs, as well as to recordings from the period in question. "Also we were fortunate in knowing a lot of people who went back to that era," he says, "like Eubie Blake, Kay Swift and Irving Caesar. The point I'm making is that, where with a lot of classical music you have to go on written description and what teachers tell us, with a lot of this music it's possible to hear it and be taught by someone who knows the original style."
Many would agree that the era the Bolcoms focus on, at least from the standpoint of the American musical theater, was indeed golden. For one thing the songs themselves were often designed to be extracted from their shows, something Bolcom attributes to the publishing arrangements of the day.
"Back then it used to be the publishers who were the producers of the shows and it was in their interest not only to push the show but to push the songs. The result was that everybody plugged those songs. Also Broadway was only a few blocks from Publisher's Row and since the second World War the places where tunes come from have gone far beyond New York. Rock, rhythm and blues, country and western - things no longer come primarily from one source. Nowadays show tunes are almost never pushed as anything other than the original-cast album which in turn is usually bought by people who have seen the show. It used to be that I'd go see a movie with my parents and if we liked the songs we'd go down and buy the sheet music."
In wider context Bolcom sees that as part of music having become something of a spectator sport in our day.
"It used to be that people would learn songs and sing them themselves. Now, instead of participating in music, we just sit back and listen to it. We've forgotten that the amateur is somebody who does something to enjoy it, and the upshot is that people feel no connection with their own culture, even their own lives."
For that reason there will be a few singalongs on next weekend's programs, as well as a repertoire that itself does a bit of gap-bridging. "The longer we are in this business the more we realize how it pinches both categories to label things `classical' and `popular,' " Morris observes, "as though nothing in popular music can be serious and nothing in classical music can be funny." In this case, her husband adds, "We'll try to make what is essentially a pops concert a little more substantial, but it still should be fun."
Tickets to Friday's and Saturday's concerts range in price from $10 to $17, with student tickets available at $5. For information call 533-NOTE or 533-6307.