Anyone who has ever tried to write music knows that it requires an assortment of cruelly disparate skills.
The first is the ability to cultivate solitude, to pull sounds from the dreamy murk and test their musical promise. Next comes the tedious labor of capturing these ideas on paper. Add to this the thankless, endless task of getting one's music noticed, performed, published and preserved: The composer must be a poet and politician in equal measure.Paul Bowles, the legendary expatriate who made his first American appearance in 26 years at a concert of his works at Alice Tully Hall on Tuesday night, is a case of a composer who gave up.
He drifted into composition at around the age of 20 and soon enough displayed striking gifts. Despite an incorrigible lack of interest in the technical aspects of music making, he attracted the attention of leading American composers of the 1930s, particularly Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson. He wrote for theater and ballet, and his concert works shared programs with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions.
But at the end of the 1940s, the composer ceased composing. The routine of theater work wore him down. The acclaim that greeted his first major literary efforts - notably "The Sheltering Sky" - eclipsed the more modest praise that a few enthusiasts had bestowed on his music. The grand obsessions of the composer's life did not interest him.
In a word, he was lazy. Ned Rorem, who worked as a copyist on some of his scores, marveled at their amateurishness. He moved to Morocco, and his literary legend grew steadily in reclusion. The music all but disappeared.
A new chamber orchestra called the Eos Ensemble has set out to prove that Bowles' music deserves fame in its own right. Tuesday's concert, the first event in a three-day Bowles festival, made a very good case.
Eos presented Bowles' "Pastorela" Suite, his song cycle "Secret Words" and his Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, alongside Copland's "Music for the Theater" and Stravinsky's Suite No. 2. Despite moments of imprecise construction, Bowles' works impressively withstood these challenging juxtapositions.
The musical language, derived in equal parts from Satie, Stravinsky and the great Mexican eccentric Silvestre Revueltas, sounds fresh and surprising after 50 years.
Lyric ideas of deceptive simplicity hover over a sparsely figured, ambiguous harmonic background. Passages that teeter on the edge of kitsch are saved by tart dissonances and sly instrumentation. Dancelike episodes are propelled by lopsided, infectious rhythm. The whole exerts a mysterious, unnerving charm.
The Eos Ensemble is the brainchild of Jonathan Sheffer, a conductor who has worked mainly in theater and films. With generous financial backing, he has gathered some of the most accomplished of New York's freelance musicians. His conducting was rhythmically stiff, but he knows how to hold a piece together.
His one misjudgment was a syrupy orchestration of "Secret Words," which drowned Bowles' spiky harmonies in Korngoldian plushness. Kurt Ollmann sang with typical expressivity; Alan Feinberg and Leslie Stifelman gamely navigated the concerto.
A frail-seeming Bowles acknowledged the audience's applause from his seat in the balcony.
On Thursday night Eos was to present four more Bowles works, including his zarzuela opera, "The Wind Remains," in conjunction with Revueltas' brilliant "Homenaje a Federico Garcia Lorca." More remains to be explored, though not a great deal more. Bowles' is one of many sadly unfinished stories in American music.