BOLCOM: Songs
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William Bolcom (b. 1938) Songs This selection by Carole Farley of my songs covers forty years of my writing for both concert and theater. Not everyone can...
William Bolcom (b. 1938)
Songs
This selection by Carole Farley of my songs covers
forty years of my writing for both concert and theater.
Not everyone can shift stylistic gears as easily and
brilliantly as she from straight-out Broadway parody
(Casino Paradise's Night, Make My Day) to difficult art
music (the I Will Breathe a Mountain cycle). Who but a
courageous soprano would start a recording with a
scream? Carole has begun her programme with You
Cannot Have Me Now, from the 1969 opera for actors
Greatshot, written for the Yale Repertory Theater in
1969; the character is a German war-bride in a marriedofficers'
neighbourhood on a military base, telling us of
her and her husband's wild goings-on among the brass
and NCOs. A friend at Stanford met such a woman
living at a California airbase, and Arnold Weinstein's
lyric stretches her story only slightly; the part about a
ten-year duration is evidently true to life. Night, Make
My Day, from the 1990 theatre opera Casino Paradise,
is sung torchily by the young repressed spinster Cis
anticipating a wedding night that, at the last minute, is
snatched from her. Weinstein and I intended it as a sendup
of a Liza Minnelli-ish over-the-top extravaganza, but
the cabaret performer Karen Akers has performed it
straight, to our amazement. Cis will reappear, telling us
why her love life is so lonely, in My Father the
Gangster.
When Marilyn Horne gave her farewell concert a
few years ago (of concert and opera repertoire only; she
still performs popular music wonderfully), she asked for
a contribution. May Swenson's The Digital Wonder
Watch was the result; the poem celebrates her
companion's recent acquisition of a phenomenal multiuse
timepiece.
My long-time friend and frequent collaborator the
conductor Dennis Russell Davies began a project with
the rock diva Marianne Faithfull involving my
collaboration with the poet-playwright Frank
McGuinness - of which this terrifying poem, The Last
Days of Mankind, was the only song achieved.
Dan Wagoner is one of my favourite New York
dancers; imagine William Blake's spirit-portrait Glad
Day come to life. His dancing has sometimes brought
tears. Wagoner's companion George Montgomery, a
spare, laconic poet of last century's postwar New York
School, is, I am told, better known in Spanish translation
than in English; Songs to Dance is a trio for singer,
dancer, and piano that Dan, my wife Joan Morris, and I
performed - only once - at New York's Joyce Theater.
When Marilyn Horne asked for a cycle of songs
from American women poets, she had already picked
Emily Dickinson's The Bustle in the House, which
Marilyn had read at her brother's funeral. I in turn asked
my friend Alice Fulton to pick an anthology for me,
including one of her own poems; I felt her choices
would lend I Will Breathe a Mountain a special verbal
topography - something I had also requested from the
poet T. J. Anderson III for the choral cycle The Mask.
The wide poetic range incorporates Edna St. Vincent
Millay (in sonnet form), Fulton (in an evocation of her
early womanhood in Troy, New York), the eminent
African-American Gwendolyn Brooks, the febrile Anne
Sexton, the 1920s bohemian HD (Hilda Doolittle), the
Washington State poet Denise Levertov, Dickinson, the
mid-century New York poet, and editor Louise Bogan,
the same May Swenson of The Digital Wonder Watch,
and finally the great Elizabeth Bishop in a slightly
abridged rendering of The Fish.
My close friend the Memphis-born poet Richard
Tillinghast is known both in the United States and in
Ireland; Costa del Nowhere, a rueful encounter, is
followed by Richard's translation of The Table, from the
eminent Turkish poet Cansever.
It has sometimes been tendered that William
Blake's poem Mary was inspired by his friend, the
celebrated early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
The director Paul Sills, founder of the Second City
troupe from which so very many prominent American
actors sprang, and who had directed both our Dynamite
Tonite and Greatshot, called desperately one day in
1980 to Arnold Weinstein and me to help: A young pair
of producers planned to bring The Wind in the Willows
to Broadway, and would we contribute a score? The two
young men seemed particularly green to us - one of
their ideas was a promotional button reading I've Been
TOAD Away - and it was not long before Paul lost
patience with them and quit the project (the two went on
to commission a rock score, turning Badger into a
female for 'love interest' and sponsoring the longest
preview run ever on Broadway with their show, which
closed immediately upon opening). A few years ago the
painter-producer-director John Wulp would enlist
musician Scott Griffin to arrange our existing songs into
a score for a children's production on the offshore
Maine island North Haven.
And finally we come to the earliest song, from my
first collaboration with Weinstein, When We Built the
Church. Arnold's and my working partnership was
matchmade by Darius Milhaud, who had met Weinstein
in Florence and passed me a libretto (then called A
Comedy of Horrors) one day in 1960 after class in Paris.
I immediately wanted to set it because of its beautiful
balance of the colloquial and classical, a specialty of
Arnold's. Retitled Dynamite Tonite, the work employed
singing actors - I must say I did not realise while
composing it how more apropos they would be than
'straight' singers - and the short-lived Actors Studio
Theater produced the show in 1963. Dynamite is less an
anti-war piece than a Marx-Brothersish dramma giocoso
about war; Alvin Epstein, the Sergeant squirreled in a
bunker with the Captain during an endless conflict
nobody remembers the reason for, sings this wistful
memorial for his bombed church.
William Bolcom
Greatshot: You Cannot Have Me Now - or, The Military Orgy (more info)
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Greatshot: You cannot have me now (The Military Orgy) - 5:23
Casino Paradise: Night Make My Day (more info)
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Casino Paradise: Night Make My day - 2:17
The Digital Wonder Watch (An Advertisment) (more info)
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The Digital Wonder Watch (An Advertisment) - 3:03
Casino Paradise: My Father the Gangster (more info)
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Casino Paradise: My Father the Gangster - 2:39
The Last Days of Mankind (more info)
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The Last Days of Mankind - 3:29
Songs to Dance (more info)
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This is a face - 0:56
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Since I have - 0:52
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The rabbit - 1:01
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I am not free - 0:48
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For me - 0:35
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From wandering - 1:04
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Beware - 0:44
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I wouldn't die - 0:44
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I remember - 0:43
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For everything - 0:34
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I have climbed - 1:14
I Will Breathe a Mountain (more info)
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Pity me not the light of day (text: E. St. Vincent Millay) - 2:10
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How to Swing Those Obbligations Around (text: A. fulton) - 1:37
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The Crazy Women (text: G. Brooks) - 2:06
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Just Once (A. Sexton) - 1:28
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Never more will the wind (text: H. Doolittle) - 1:23
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The Sage (text: D. Levertov) - 1:28
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O To Be a Dragon (text: M. Moore) - 0:53
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The Bustle in a House (text: E. Dickinson) - 1:26
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I Saw Eternity (text: L. Bogan) - 1:34
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Night Practice (text: M. Swenson) - 2:28
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The Fish (text: E. Bishop) - 3:04
Tillinghast Duo (more info)
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Costa del Nowhere (text: R. Tillinghast) - 3:09
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Table (text: E. Cansever, translated: R. Tillinghast) - 2:14
Mary (more info)
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Mary - 5:06
The Wind in the Willows: Three Songs (more info)
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River Song - 1:10
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Messing About in Boats - 1:45
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Rat's Song - 2:19
Dynamite Tonite: When We Built the Church (more info)
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Dynamite Tonite: When we built the church - 2:10