We arrive at “Paul Bowles on Music,” a book I edited with Irene Herrmann.
Before he became the celebrated novelist of “The Sheltering Sky” and a cult figure in Tangier, Bowles was a composer and music critic at the Herald Tribune in New York, where Virgil Thomson was his boss. He also wrote for the important periodical Modern Music.
With the help of Herrmann, I selected the reviews and essays contained in this volume, wrote the introduction and the questions for the interview (Bowles’ last), which Herrmann carried with her to Tangier and dutifully put to Bowles while she taped his answers. I transcribed the tape and presto, we had a nifty interview about Bowles’ life as a music critic.
It took me a couple of years to put the book together, in my copious spare time. I remember much work with microfilm; a trip to UCLA special collections to retrieve an article by Bowles from an obscure avant-garde magazine; and writing to Mademoiselle for permission to reprint a couple of articles that Bowles wrote for the magazine. I never received an answer but I had done my due diligence. We put them in the book.
It came out in 2003 and got some nice reviews from Tim Page and Judith Weir and others. It never quite made the New York Times bestseller list, though.
Bowles was a good critic, who came at the job much as Thomson did, as a composer who knew something about the nuts and bolts of music and who also had his own strong aesthetic.
The photos above show the cover; the title page; the table of contents; the first page of my introduction; and two random reviews (one of violinist Samuel Dushkin and one of Stravinsky conducting his own music) from the Herald Tribune, which will give you the flavor of Bowles’ style.
As always, click on the photos for larger (readable) views.
Update: You can buy a used copy of the book for one cent plus shipping here.
classical life 
My favorite music criticism book! Well done, Timothy John!
Hello Tim, Gerry Schroeder. Almost finished reading my autographed copy of the Bowles book ;-). It’s great fun understanding what a serious critic thought of the music scene during the 1940’s. More on that in just a moment.
I’ve also begun re-reading Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise, as Bowles’ reviews of classical musical performances and general thought in the 1940’s put my mind in motion.
As I’ve gotten to a “certain age”, I’ve been giving away part of my large music book collection to schools and friends, plus musician/teachers, etc. Last week when I came across the Ross book, I couldn’t help but start re-reading his various passages on composers and the music and musicians from that frenzied past – the 20th Century – to compare how we look at it now versus how Bowles examined it some 70 years ago in New York.
A. I feel that Bowles was an astute critic of “classical” performances, but wasn’t yet sure what jazz really was back in 1944/45. He was especially very critical of jazz performers, and their performances, sometimes just missing the boat. He seemed to ‘like” jazz, but seemed uneasy because the performers weren’t up to his classical standards.
B. He wasn’t too keen on the blending of jazz into classical, i.e. Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess although he liked some of it. He seemed to feel there was very little merit in Duke Ellington’s extended works.Such as when he wrote re Duke’s Black, Brown and Beige as “being formless and meaningless… a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work”…and later “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged’. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, with all my years spent listening to jazz and classical music as they developed since 1944 😉
C. Boy, he did really LOVE Leonard Bernstein. I.E. giving the Jeremiah symphony a rave review, and kept writing that LB was destined for greatness on the podium. (DITTO! on both counts.)
D. Reading the names of the composers, the orchestras, and the various performers that he heard on his watch were such a pleasure. And those were the World War II years. One wouldn’t know there was a war going on. I was 10 years old in 1944, so had no idea what was happening in the Big Apple, and it really wasn’t until college when all of those names came to mean something musically to me. I’ll wait a year and probably just read through it again.
So thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
All the best, and keep up the fine work you’re doing for our part of SoCal.
We are so lucky to have you.
Gerry