Bolcom's "Five Fold Five"

Synopsis

Most young American composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, whether Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?

For the young American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the school of Schoenberg was not all that appealing… He said: “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to, but I said to hell with it.” According to his teacher and mentor, the French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was as “gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in many of his own compositions, including his magnum opus, a three-hour oratorio based on William Blake’s poems entitled “Songs of Innocence and Experience.”

Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow. Take this Bolcom piece for woodwind quintet and piano, for example. It’s entitled “Five Fold Five,” and was premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. “Five Fold Five” starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.

Music Played in Today's Program

William Bolcom (b. 1938) Five Fold Five Detroit Chamber Winds; William Bolcom, piano Koch 7395

On This Day

Births

• 1892 - English composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (Christian name Leon Dudley), in Chingford, to a Parsi father and Spanish-Sicilian mother); His major work, "Opus Clavicembalisticum," is one of the longest and most complex solo piano works ever written;

• 1910 - French composer Pierre Schaeffer, in Nancy; He pioneered a style of electronic music known as "musique concrète";

Deaths

• 1972 - American composer and pianist Oscar Levant, age 65, in Beverly Hills, Calif.;

• 1987 - American composer Vincent Persichetti, age 72, in Philadelphia;

Premieres

• 1814 - Rossini: opera, "Il Turco in Italia" (The Turk in Italy), in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala;

• 1876 - first complete performance of Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle continues at Bayreuth with a performance of "Die Walküre" (The Valkyrie); This opera had received its premiere performance in Munich on June 26, 1870;

• 1942 - Rubbra: Symphony No.4, in London;

• 1952 - R. Strauss: opera "Die Liebe der Danae," (The Love of Danae) produced posthumously at the Salzburg Festival; A dress rehearsal of the opera attended by the composer had taken place at Salzburg on August 16, 1944, but the actual premiere was cancelled due to the war; Both performances were conducted by Clemens Krauss;

• 1954 - Malcolm Arnold: Harmonica Concerto, at a Proms Concert in London, by harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler;

• 1961 - Cowell: "Scherzo" (from "Air and Scherzo") for saxophone and piano, at the Camp Kinhaven in Weston, Vt., by saxophonist Sigurd Rascher; Cowell later arranged this work for saxophone and chamber orchestra;

Others

• 1703 - Johann Sebastian Bach begins his duties as organist at the Bonifaciuskirche in Arnstadt, where he would stay for four years (see also: August 4 and 9)