Classical Life

(Part 3 of a talk delivered at the Paul Bowles Centennial Festival at University of California, Santa Cruz, February 2011.)

Or this:

February 25, 1944, New York Herald Tribune

While Strauss’s glorification of the Uebermensch was in the act of being played last night, one found oneself wondering why, unless he wished to make as obvious a contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous in music, Dr. Rodzinski had chosen to expose the ugly form and character of Also Sprach Zarathustra to the Carnegie Hall public directly after the miraculous G Minor Symphony of Mozart. Throughout the course of its convulsions, one thinks of the behavior of some venomous insect or reptile which refuses to stop moving even after it has been hacked to pieces. When the last harmonica-like chord had been uttered and the piece had come to its end, one understood why the time necessary to a sonorously integrated performance such as last night’s had been spent on the work — the public likes this kind of music!

Thus there is no more to say on the subject, save to express one’s ingenuous wonder that this same public should not demand, in a work where the composer screams “wolf!” so very many times, that he should produce such an animal somewhere between the beginning and the end of the piece.

Bad music had social consequences for Bowles. His criticism traveled between two poles, from the reportorial on one end, to the adversarial on the other, as the case, in his mind, warranted. Sometimes he managed to mix the voices, as in his unusually astute reviews of new music to which he was sympathetic. On the other hand, the Mahler and the Strauss reviews quoted, whether one agrees with them or not, are worthy of inclusion in Slonimsky’s famous “Lexicon of Musical Invective.”

He seems to have loathed Rachmaninoff above all practitioners of his art, at least in print. (Out of a sense of self-preservation, perhaps, he never committed his distaste for Beethoven to writing.)

“The piece itself,” he wrote of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, “is couched in an unamusing, degenerate style whose sole point seems to be that of keeping the textures every moment at the highest possible degree of richness. Unfortunately that richness palls almost immediately, as greasiness does in cooking.”

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I’ll be making a rare public appearance before the legions of my adoring fans this weekend as part of the Bowles at 100 festival at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (Schedule here.) I’ll take part in a panel Saturday morning with the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa and the ethnomusicologist Philip Schuyler. My lecture, naturally, is titled “Paul Bowles as Music Critic,” and it’s largely based, also naturally, on my book.

In addition to the conference talks and lectures, there will be concerts featuring Bowles’ own distinguished music and an exhibition of images and artifacts from his career.

If you happen to be in Santa Cruz over the weekend, stop on by. Mention this blog and you’ll receive a completely dumbfounded look and a free handshake.

“The piece itself is couched in an unamusing, degenerate style whose sole point seems to be that of keeping the textures every moment at the highest possible degree of richness. Unfortunately that richness palls almost immediately, as greasiness does in cooking.” — Paul Bowles on Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2.