(A talk delivered at the Paul Bowles Centennial Festival at University of California, Santa Cruz, February 2011.)
When the French composer Hector Berlioz became a music critic, in the 1830s, he called it a “calamity.”
“I must now describe the circumstances by which I came to be caught in the toils of criticism,” he wrote in his Memoirs.
Berlioz thought of criticism as a form of warfare, as a way of fighting his musical enemies and of elevating his music heroes — of literally settling scores. That warfare wore on him throughout his long career as a music critic. What’s more, despite his sparkling literary style, Berlioz confessed that he hated prose composition, often agonizing over or putting off the writing of an article for days.
A century later, another composer, Paul Bowles, took up music criticism as well. He initially had reservations about it — especially about the tight deadlines required by the newspaper journalism of the day. But he grew to enjoy writing music criticism and, in the process, writing prose. His decade of writing music criticism paved the way for his fiction.
From 1339 through the first part of 1945, in fact, he published nothing in prose but music criticism, and quite a substantial amount of it. From 1931, he had contributed translations of articles on music, then his own music criticism, the journal Modern Music, a publication of the League of American Composers. Aaron Copland, Bowles’s teacher, friend and, probably, one-time lover, was the guiding light of both the League and the journal. Then, from 1942 through early 1946, Bowles served on the music reviewing staff of the New York Herald Tribune, where another friend and teacher, Virgil Thomson, reigned as chief critic. In his three and a half years there, he wrote more than four hundred music reviews and columns.
Classical Life 