A Conversation With William Bolcom

Teaching Composition in Twenty-First-Century America: A Conversation with William
Bolcom
Author(s): MARILYN SHRUDE
Source: American Music, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 173-190
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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MARILYN SHRUDE
Teaching Composition
in Twenty-First-Century America:
A Conversation with
William Bolcom
ms: You’ve taught for a long time, although you’re not a full-time fac-
ulty member at the University of Michigan anymore. But I know you
still teach.
wb: Sure. [Bolcom retired in 2008.]
ms: Do you use a particular methodology in teaching composition?
wb: No! Well, do you?
ms: No.
wb: I mean, everybody’s different, you know. But you try to find out what
their formation is. You try to find out what they’ve done and what
they’re doing, and what their interests are, and so on. I used to have
a problem in teaching I no longer have. I used to feel it was very im-
Composer and pianist William Bolcom has received the Pulitzer Prize in Music,
the National Medal of Arts, and a Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary
Composition. He was named Composer of the Year by Musical America in 2007.
Bolcom’s compositions include symphonies, chamber music, concertos, operas,
works for both symphony and brass bands, piano and organ works, and vocal
and choral music, and are widely performed and recorded by organizations all
over the world. He is now retired from the University of Michigan where he
taught composition from 1973 to 2008.
Composer and pianist Marilyn Shrude is chair of the Department of Musicology/
Composition/Theory at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) and founder and
past director of the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music. She is the re-
cipient of numerous awards and honors including the Kennedy Center Friedheim
Award for Orchestral Music, Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creative Achievement,
American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Music, Cleveland Arts Prize,
and Chamber Music America/ASCAP Award for Adventuresome Programming
at BGSU. Together with saxophonist John Sampen, she has premiered, recorded,
and presented hundreds of works by living composers both in the United States
and abroad.
American Music Summer 2010
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
174 Shrude
portant for a person to find a way to deal with where they came from
musically, at some point or other, because otherwise they were ending
up writing something that wasn’t theirs. In 1973, when I started here,
there was a time when everybody wanted to be George Crumb. They
came in doing Lorca settings, all trying to be little Crumbs, and they
didn’t add up to a cookie. They were just, sort of, all little Crumbs.
[laughter] And there’s nothing wrong with it and I love George, but
there’s one George Crumb, you know. He was the guy to beat—ev-
erybody was trying to. But other people too were doing what they
thought was expected of them. Sometimes I’d have to sit down, about
the second class, and say, “You know, what’s your background, musi-
cally?” And they’d gulp and say, “Well, I used to play in a garage rock
band when I was in my teens.” I say, “Well, that’s terrific.” You knew
that this person was ashamed of even playing rock, because that was
a period when there was still a stigma about that in music schools. A
lot of people there were nonperforming composers and dismissive of
people who were performers, which was very Byzantine. And then the
conversation would go on. I’d say, “So, do you still play in the garage
or rock band you describe?” Gulp, “Yes.” And I’d say, “Well, why is
it not reflected in what you’re writing?”
You don’t have to walk around your past. It’s perfectly all right
to expand, no reason to stay within the situation stylistically. But
something of what you got in rock, or whatever you’ve been doing,
will have something to do with how you write, because part of your
personality is your performing self. The performing self completes
a musician. After all, pretty much all the people we’re still playing
from previous centuries were terrific performers; they had that sense
of what it was to perform, and that never left them, even if they quit
performing. You, Marilyn, can as a performer relate to that. The ones
who didn’t perform, you don’t hear much of usually, and that’s cer-
tainly true with that big wasteland of twentieth-century unperform-
able music, much of which comes out of the whole academic notion
of not needing to be a complete musician.
Now, in 1973 when I came to the University of Michigan, I didn’t
come here with the purpose of crusading for performing musicians.
But I did feel it was important that a person continue as much as pos-
sible to have some sense of that relationship, because it does give you
a sense of your part in the whole big picture of making music. Yo-Yo
Ma used to say—he probably still does—that there are three elements
in any performance: the performer, the piece, and the audience, and
there’s a kind of electric current flowing through those three poles. The
idea is to keep that current going. And you, the composer, are part of
it, too. Which means one of your biggest decisions will be, how do I
keep that current, the electricity, going?
A Conversation with William Bolcom 175
A composer-saxophonist now on our jazz faculty came in with this

very desiccated stuff, and after a few weeks I said, “This isn’t you. Why
are you doing this?” Sometimes jazz people get a notion about how
they should “compose” a piece, versus just the act of playing even an
improvised one. To them, “composing” necessitates scoring, getting
out the orchestration book, dusting off early training—and sometimes
the result is surprisingly constricted. How to get the student past this
notion is a major job. After several months, the same student said to
me, “You know, what you said really liberated me. I suddenly realized
I gotta be who I am.” One has to find one’s thing.
This was the problem in the 1970s when I came to teach at the Uni-
versity of Michigan; it is far less to be found right now with the younger
crew. They all seem to know that now—they seem to be willing to be
performers. Nearly everyone who has come out of the University of
Michigan who is known, is known equally as a performer and as a com-
poser, as if there were no division. They are quite complete musicians,
which is to my mind what is a natural way to be. That, I think, makes
a better, more performable, living music than music that was made
purely out of the head—although that’s got its place, too. Some part
of music has always been mind games; they can sometimes form the
armature for a person’s own music. But that’s only part of the piece.
ms: Do you use any technical exercises?
wb: No. I mean—Oh, for people!
ms: Yes.
wb: Oh, yes! Yes, I do. It depends on what I figure they’ve had before they
start with me. If they do not have any real contrapuntal background,
if they don’t know how to make voices operate in some kind of inter-
esting way amongst themselves, then I give them good old-fashioned
species counterpoint. I pull out the old Steps to Parnassus—it’s the book
you can get from Norton which is an abridged translation of the old
J. J. Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum. And it’s funny, and it gives you some
idea of old teaching methods. It’s kind of charmingly human, because
at the end of the lessons the professor says, “I can’t teach you any more
because I’ve now got the gout.” Then you follow out Fux’s exercises
fully as they are. They are flawed; for example, he never gets his own
fourth species right—it’s full of mistakes, it’s terrible.
But the point is that it makes you think of the game side of it. There
are rules; you can make a mistake, and then you see your own work
more objectively. But also you begin to say, “Gee, I can actually move
this voice over here,” rather than what you might have done without
that opportunity of rules forcing you to choose. And before you know
it, you’ve become a master of voices, and you begin to think of it in
terms of independent voices. And you begin to realize that every first
thought isn’t automatically the best one; you can possibly find other
176 Shrude
ones that will work better, and it actually opens up your technique.
So I have often done that with certain people, even graduate students.
We start them with first species, and we go on bit by bit to fifth spe-
cies. And if they want to keep going, we go to three voices, and so
on—but only because it opens up their thinking in linear ways. That
Norton book is the one thing I’ve ever used; I’ve never used one of
the various textbooks that sprang from Fux. I haven’t used it with
everybody, but I’ve had to use it over the years—maybe with ten,
fifteen students.
ms: What’s your approach toward using literature? Do you assign a list
of works for listening? Emphasize the masters? Recently composed
music?
wb: It depends upon the person. Some people, not many in a time where
everything in school seems to be spoon-fed, are pretty good at hunt-
ing down literature for themselves. Other people have holes in their
background, and again we want to find out what they are. I had one
DMA candidate, in rebellion against his father evidently, who had
never heard the Beethoven symphonies because he had decided that
was his father’s music, and he was into rock. And I said, “You’re an
idiot.” [laughs] I said, “You know, Beethoven is the biggest revolution-
ary of all. Go listen to those symphonies and shut up.” So he did. And
he came back, and he said, “I don’t know why I didn’t do it before. I
didn’t realize what incredible pathfinding, mad, interesting pieces they
are—they’re wilder than anything in rock.” And I said, “Well, about
time you’d listen to them.” He was twenty-seven.
So you find out they have these lacunae. Sometimes we find that
out even in their orals. There was a guy I remember who is now quite
prominent in the New York scene, who didn’t understand sonata-al-
legro form. And he was analyzing a Schumann symphony, which was
not necessarily the best place to look for form, and he didn’t under-
stand what a development was about, the idea of it, you know, what
the tradition was. And we found this out when he was doing his orals.
So we sent him off to eighteenth-century form and analysis. And so
you find out what the deficiencies are, and you deal with every one
of them as best you can. Some people come in knowing. Some people
have an incredible amount of experience. One, a master’s candidate,
had been the librarian for the San Francisco Symphony. I didn’t have to
tell him about bowings and things; he knew all that stuff. And so then,
this question—where are his other deficiencies? In this case there were
certain literature things I wanted him to get involved in. Also, he had a
Hispanic background, which was something he had never explored—
you know, generally. But I said, “Don’t do it because you want to be
nationalistic, but because it may be part of your potential equipment in
music.” The idea wasn’t to turn him into a Hispanic composer; it’s just
a rich tradition that is worth knowing—I’m a huge fan of early piano

music from Brazil, Venezuela, Puerto Rico.
ms: Do you do any analysis projects as part of your composition les-
sons?
wb: Sometimes. It depends, again, on the person. I might say, “Bring me
something you’ve looked at.” When I feel they are really deficient,
sometimes I assign them pieces and we look at them very carefully.
I’m not a Schenkerian. I have my big fights with Schenker. What I’m
trying to get a person to be aware of is: What was the idea and the
language this person was working in? And where were the decisions
they made? And how they made them, and where they made them,
and why they made them. And that would be of some use to you as
a composer.
ms: Not like a theorist.
wb: Oh no, no. What’s the intention here? No, no. The theorist always
takes the desiccated remains. A colleague who was on our faculty for
a number of years (who had won every single composition contest
in the 1950s, BMI and all of them) decided to become a theorist, and
that was it. He used to see us in the school hallways and say, “I can’t
understand you guys still writing music.”
ms: [laughs]
wb: He did! I couldn’t believe it. [laughs] But that’s okay. Andrew Mead,
who’s with us now, is a very strict serialist, but he’s quite open to abso-
lutely everything. He’s a different kind of mind. There were still—and
you remember it, too—the ideological struggles in music-making. I’m
enough older that it was right in the middle of my really toughest years
as a graduate student, and I think you probably still had some of it. But
in my time, it was taboo to be tonal at all. And you had to pretend you
had some sort of system. In fact, everybody would compare systems.
This was the time, and I sort of just kept my own counsel. But I did
get involved with interval series, which I still use sometimes. And I
did get a little bit involved with how you could use twelve-tone. But
I decided they were disciplines like any other, and I would use them
when I felt like it, the same as Bach would use fugue. Which is, I say,
not all the time.
And there’s no reason to have to deal with the ideological atmo-
sphere at all. You can be tonal if you want to and still use serial tech-
niques. I mean, they’re useful except all the ideological crap, which
we all had to deal with. And it was terrific peer pressure. It would be
more from peers, I think, than from your teachers, because your teach-
ers, you figured, had to be wrong because they were old.
ms: Do you use a book?
wb: No, never did. I don’t believe in those things. I think Hindemith
wrote his book (The Craft of Musical Composition), and I’m afraid it
178 Shrude
did him in as a composer, no matter what he said. I mean, he’s still

wonderful, but there’s a certain freshness and nuttiness in his early
music. In 2005 I remember hearing a bunch of new performances of
very early 1920s Hindemith music they happened to do up at Marlboro
that summer. I was amazed at the freshness. And then he went and
kicked himself with that—
ms: Codified everything.
wb: And it sounds it. You know, I fell out of love with it all. Of course,
in the 1950s everyone was convinced that Hindemith was the Bach
of the twentieth century, and everyone wanted to have me go study
with him. They didn’t realize that he had already left Yale after 1953.
Out in Washington State, we all thought he still was at Yale! And in
1958 when I was going to to study with either Milhaud or Hindemith,
people said, “Don’t study with Milhaud. He’s French. Hindemith is
a great composer.” And I had just played through all the Hindemith
sonatas with various performers, the ones for each instrument and
piano. And after the fourth one—
ms: I did that, too. [laughs]
wb: And after the fourth one, you get the idea? And you think, “God.
They’re all exactly the same, aren’t they? And so is everything else! And,
oh dear. Here comes the transition. And here’s the—.” And I think, “I
don’t want to be like that.” So I was much happier with Milhaud. But
in many places there was a terrific kind of academic pressure to com-
pose a certain way. I think the younger people don’t seem to have too
much of that now; I do run into schools where the pressure is still there.
Oh yeah. And their teachers are very embattled and quite hostile. The
students, however, are no longer terrified of everybody else, as in my
time, and don’t have to deal with that sort of thing anymore.
ms: That’s right, that’s true. Now this is different: What’s your expecta-
tion regarding output for a student? A certain amount per week?
wb: Write as much as they can.
ms: Semester?
wb: Write as much as they can.
ms: Just individualize?
wb: I think so. Some people have to go through different periods. I had
one student sent to me from California by a good friend. So this young
man was working on his orchestral piece, for a youth orchestra, but
also for his master’s. He went over the first page, he rewrote that—
every week he’d rewrite the first several pages. He couldn’t get past
that first section. And at times like that, you just have to wait for it.
But then he eventually got past the hump, and it became a very decent
piece. After that he really got his bearings and became stronger in his
own self. But he was tied in knots. He’d tried every bloody thing. But
I couldn’t hurry him or badger him. Another very talented one had
been going through similar problems. Every week he’d come in—very
industrious, but he couldn’t get past page 1, so to speak. But then one
day, he got to page 2, and that was a very self-defining moment. I
think you’ve had this, too, with people going through a certain crisis;
there’s been that moment where they finally have a breakthrough. You
just have to be patient.
I had one doctoral student, who would come in so overwhelmed
with expectations of what he thought his teachers wanted him to do,
that he was writing this awful turgid stuff, you know, anal-retentive
music. He’s a nice person, and I thought, “Wow, what are we going to
do with this guy?” So I decided to pull the silent, expensive psychiatrist
routine because I didn’t know what to say. I just hated what he was
doing because I knew it wasn’t him. He was doing what he thought was
expected of him in such a way that he was really so clearly unhappy. It
wouldn’t have been right to attack his teachers, though I sure felt like
it. So I got him to talk about his family, his Peace Corps experience,
and this went on for a year and a half. And finally, his then-wife and
he had a baby, and he wrote it a lullaby. He brought it to me, and I said,
“Finally I think this is the first piece of yours that’s yours.”
ms: Yes.
wb: And it had been a really big challenge, because I didn’t know what to
do. He had his chops, but he just had these notions. So I just had him
write them out and get them out of his system. He realized that it was
not working with me, and that he would have to please himself before
he was going to please me at all. And he had clearly never done that
before. I think a composer has to get along with himself. You know,
you’ve got to write your music, I’ve got to write my music, and so
the idea is to find out what that is. And then the disciplines all grow
out of that. I mean, you’ve got to start from that particular point of
view, rather than some kind of overwhelming “historical inevitabil-
ity,” which people used to talk about a lot. Because what’s interesting
about the historical inevitability people is that they were wrong every
time. It never turned out the way they said it must. And, of course, a
lot of people are antiprocess now, and I said, “Process is a tool like any
other.” You know, there’s a way to use it. There’s no reason to have to
go into the ideology.
ms: Right.
wb: I think everybody should have some time in counterpoint, and to
study twelve-tone technique, just to be able to know how to deal with
it. How do you make it sound musical? How would somebody do it?
And how did different people use it? Where can it be liberated? Did
it really help or hurt the composer who used it later in life? Copland
used it in his last years, but he also had written his populist pieces
before, and there’s no conflict. His orchestra piece Connotations, is a
180 Shrude
perfectly nice piece but finally in the Piano Fantasy I heard something
that made real sense. The twelve-tone style usually can sound so dis-
cursive, but you can make it make sense. You have to understand it,
that’s all. But it’s still Copland. Very much so. But that isn’t to negate
the other pieces; it’s just that that’s what he did with the system. It’s
like Picasso in his Cubist period. It’s all Picasso.
And the same thing with Copland: his individual stance as a com-
poser was stronger than many others. I’ve seen other people who
were destroyed by serialism. I’ve seen—well, a faculty member—I
won’t say his name—who had written these really strong and very
emotional piano pieces. They had a lot of power to them. And then
he got involved with twelve-tone. Fizzled out. His own personality
got destroyed by it. And it was a shame. It might have helped some-
body else. But I never prescribe. I don’t say, “You’ve got to do this,
you’ve got to do that.” But I do think that people should be aware of
everything that other people offer.
ms: Right. At Michigan, do they have a composition curriculum?
wb: Oh, you have a thing that’s called Basic Craft, followed by Ad-
vanced Craft, and so on—making up these silly titles for people get-
ting to their next level in school for administrative purposes. Basi-
cally you have four years of private lessons for a bachelor’s degree.
But you still have to have x number of semesters of performance.
You have, of course, all of the things you need to have—theory, or-
chestration, some counterpoint. Sometimes when the theory people
weren’t handling it, I had to teach a two-hour counterpoint course
for composers.
ms: But in lessons, for example, in the freshman year, do you have them
write particular kinds of pieces?
wb: No.
ms: So there’s nothing like that?
wb: No. No, because, we get different kinds of people. We get people
who just started, and people who have already written fifty pieces; it
varies a great deal. Some people come with a terrific amount of ad-
vancement, other people come uninformed. One student (from New
York City)—Joan [Morris, Bolcom’s wife] worked with him, too—he
came, fresh-faced and eighteen years old, living, breathing, speaking
Broadway. He was a Broadway boy from a kid. He went to every show;
his father loved it all, too, and I think did legal work in the theater. And
this young man wants to write Broadway. I’m not going to be able to
turn him into something else. I had to try to take him (his Broadway
style, with an unusual-for-Broadway interest in harmonic language) a
little past that. But he still is very Broadway-centered. So we just have
him do that. Which is great—he is a big talent.
ms: Okay. And this one you’ve already answered. Do you think it’s im-
portant that composers also be performers? But is there anything you’d
like to add?
wb: Well, I think that they should at least feel what it is to perform. I mean,
they don’t have to be a great performer. Berlioz certainly understood
performance, but he only played the recorder and the guitar. But he
certainly understood, through conducting, what it was to perform—
and that enlivened, certainly, his music.
ms: It’s really waning now, though, with the computers. I mean, there
are fewer and fewer composers who really come through this type
of training.
wb: There are problems there, I think. One of the things with computer
software is that machines tend to be mechanical. And there is a kind
of a machine-like regularity that comes out of the type of software
that tends to go that way as a default mode. And this is what I have
been finding a lot—I’m sure you’ve found it, too—because it’s just too
easy to take the machine’s easy way out. I had one student that wrote
a bassoon lick that went on in 3/8 for 102 measures; it went “bom
bop bop,” just repeating, repeating, because it was so easy to hit the
sequencer. I called him on it, and he came right back in defense of it.
I said, “That’s going to make boring music, and it will not survive
because, you know, it’s not interesting—people know it pretty well
after the first 50 times.” Now it seems I’m old-fashioned, because so
much music young folks listen to intently does just that—for more
than 102 times!
I mean, there’s so much stuff out there. It’s either going to grab
you or it’s not. But it’s certainly not going to if you let these machines
take over. I remember way, way back when music engraving software
started out, fifteen–twenty years ago. The first few years, there were at
least six or seven different kinds of software many people used before
we got down to the few that are now common. And at a conference in
the early 1990s where I was in residence—this was at Indiana State in
Terre Haute—composers, maybe a dozen or so of them, were show-
ing their pieces written with this or that software. And every single
piece was completely bound to what the software could or couldn’t
do. And I said, “Do you realize this machine is running your life?”
But, of course, you have to make that awareness if they don’t see that.
Much more recently, I was guest of honor at a lunch for the composi-
tion students and their professor; Joan was sitting among the students,
and when I railed against the rhythmic prison composers fall into if
too dependent on their software, a young woman next to her whis-
pered to herself, “But it’s so much easier!” That’s, I think, one of the
things where more experience in performance is necessary. It gets you
182 Shrude
out of that bind. I remember at one residency this really hotshot kid
showed me this wild piece he had done on this new software. And I
said, “Well, I don’t know about that F sharp there.” He couldn’t find
the F sharp. He didn’t know which notes he had written. You know,
he just played the note, and there it was. And, by miracle, he said,
“Hey, hey! I’ve got a score. A whole page with lots of notes on it. Oh
boy!” And that’s what they think is being a composer.
ms: Well, they do that in Hollywood, that’s for sure. Do you encourage
your students to establish a schedule? Like, work a certain amount of
hours per day, or per week, or . . . ?
wb: I think what you do is you try to find out your own schedule. Ev-
erybody has a certain modus operandi. I’m an early riser, and I guess
you are, too.
ms: I am.
wb: And it’s a good time to get work done before the world comes in.
ms: That’s right. Too distracted otherwise.
wb: Some people work at the other end of the day. It depends on if you’re
a morning person, an evening person, whatever you are. And the idea
is to try to find your own natural modus operandi. I tend to work off
and on all day, but mostly in the morning, you know, because there
are other things that have to be taken care of during life. The worst,
of course, is the telephone. And email, blech. I hate email.
ms: At least it doesn’t ring.
wb: Yes.
ms: Do you grade lessons?
wb: No. Do you?
ms: No, but some people do.
wb: Really?
ms: Yes, my husband does.
wb: Well, that’s different, because that’s performance. There’s a definite
standard. Everybody’s up against his or her own standard in what
we’re doing.
ms: Yes, composition isn’t like that.
wb: Yes. I think the main thing is if you grade, you grade against them-
selves. I tend to go for As or Bs, or sometimes all As, just because I
don’t want the student to think about the grade. And nobody is a
plus or minus, unless they really have been bad. I’ve given some—I’ve
given some people C pluses or B minuses, because I felt they really
weren’t doing as well as they should be and they needed a little slap
on the wrist. I had one in particular—the only composer student I’ve
ever had that I really actively disliked, and I’ve liked pretty much
everybody throughout. But this person really pissed me off—so very
blustery and overconfident. Second of all—somehow despite having
been to good schools—I could hear no technique or background in the
work. I prescribed three semesters of strict counterpoint; this person

just didn’t get the idea and I thought had a terrible ear. But a very
enterprising person, very good at self-promotion and getting pieces
played—still is, as I read in the New York Times. Maybe the work is
better now—I wonder what I would think of more recent output? But
when I looked at it, the music wasn’t good—mostly full of chutzpah,
and I found that very annoying.
So you can never tell what’s going to happen later to the student.
Some, maybe even many, are superstars in school and fizzle out a few
years out of school. Sometimes the less brilliant ones turn out to have a
certain kind of talent. One case I remember of a composer whose tool-
kit was very limited, but he’s done a lot of good; he’s done very good
social things, and when he writes, he’s perfectly adequate at what he
needs to do. He’s taught me a little bit about the world of how music
is changing now, which is so very, very different from what it is was.
And how do we deal with the new generation of people who don’t
know the past at all and don’t seem to have much interest in it?
ms: Well, you just talked about this a little bit, but do you teach students
how to promote themselves?
wb: Oh, Christ. That would only matter in a situation where there was
really a career! When you look at it, there is no such thing in compo-
sition. There is much more a career in performance. There are cases
where some composers have become a personality in themselves. I
mean, Ned Rorem is better known for his sexy diaries than maybe his
music, although he’s a perfectly fine composer. Everyone wants to go
and find the salacious details in his diaries, you know, so now he’s a
personality. Perhaps because of that, people started to notice, “Well,
not bad songs,” and now his work is a staple in the song repertory,
very deservedly so.
ms: He has good chamber music as well. His string quartet, I think, is
really great.
wb: I mean, he’s a good musician, a good composer. But I think he was
known for the diairies, and that’s him. I don’t know whether or not
he did it out of a life of self-promotion, but it wouldn’t have worked
if he wasn’t a very good writer. You know, he’s writing his opera now,
which, I’m dying to see. He’s in his eighties and amazing. So he’s still
working, and, you know, I think quite a bit of him. But he’s one of
those people who probably is known as much for his personality as
his music, and for the fact that his name fits well in crossword puzzles,
it turns out! He’s in them all the time. [laughs]
ms: In your view, how important is publishing?
wb: That is an interesting question, because at this particular point, pub-
lishing is going through a very interesting sea change. I have a stu-
dent, very successful now in her career, living in Berkeley, and one
184 Shrude
of the brighter lights nationally from the Bay Area. She is not at UC-
Berkeley or teaching anywhere—something more and more students
now can get away with not doing, not possible really when I was her
age. I’ll get to her later about publishing, as she is a good example of
the changes.
By the way I was in residence last semester at UC-Berkeley, and a
very sad place it felt to me. I didn’t ever get to know the composers. I
had absolutely nothing to do with anybody else there in composition
or much else; they were the most ingrown people. Of course, I remem-
ber that being true, kind of, when I was a student, not at Berkeley, but
elsewhere in California. There was even then that tendency to be sort
of, you know, “Don’t bother us” kind of quality about it. So when I
was in residence, I just went ahead and wrote. And, you know, that
was all right. It was pleasant enough. I did have fun doing the course,
Words and Music, with Robert Hass, the poet laureate. And he and I
got seven or eight students each, of both poetry and composition, to
work together.
ms: Oh, like you did at Michigan.
wb: Yeah, right. Same idea. I think we started that course, a poet friend
and I, in the mid-eighties. For the Ernst Bloch Lectureship, which I
had at U Cal, you’re supposed to do three lectures, which turned out
to be Joan’s doing with me kind of a performing history of American
popular music, all pursuant to a book she’s working on now. So she
ended up doing more of the work toward those lectures than I did.
But that’s what we were there for, the Bloch Lectureship.
But we had absolutely zero connection with the other faculty com-
posers—the only time I met most of them was at a welcoming party
for me given by a former student. And what their students were doing
was still kind of 1960s style, what I call old-fashioned avant-garde. As
was true with the poets, who were into the 1980s Language Poetry
movement, which can be simplistically defined as automatic writing
plus Gertrude Stein, and—it’s been done! I mean, we did all that so
many years ago. Why do we have to do it again? I guess they feel they
have to, but that’s academic thinking. I just realized at that point how
much it’s different here at Michigan. I mean, here we have a real con-
nection between making music on both sides of the thing, and there’s
a terrific interest in that connection.
ms: Well, Berkeley doesn’t have the performance resources like Michi-
gan.
wb: That’s a real difference. No, they have to hire people to play student
works, and they did. I went to a student new music concert, and it was,
again like 1960 all over again. But the local folks played it more or less
well. Performances were sort of good, you know, the kind new music
often gets. But there wasn’t enough time for the composers to really
get next to the players and find out much about their instruments or
their particular mentalities, to learn how to collaborate with players,
who essentially effectuated what they had written. And did it fairly
competently; there were good players in that area.
ms: There was a question about publishing, though, you were going to
get to.
wb: Well, publishing. Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Sorry, I got so full of—
ms: No, it’s okay.
wb: Okay, then, publishing. So about the young composer born and
raised in Berkeley, one of the Bay Area composers said to her, “You’re
not a regular Bay Area person; you’re not one of us. You’re not one
of our Bay Area composers.” And made her really feel unwelcome,
because she’s interested in—particularly right now, in part because
of her mother’s heritage—turning to involvement with the Andean
side of her background and its folk music. It’s something she got inter-
ested in which has influenced what she sounds like, light years away
from warmed-over 1960s avant-garde. So she’s found that she’s been
ostracized. Meantime her work is performed all over the world.
She has told me—this is why I’m talking about her in connection
with publishers—that since she has become very well thought of, well
known, and performed, Schirmer has really been publishing her and
promoting her. (Note to young composers: publishers only seem to
get interested in your work when you’re already doing reasonably
well.) It turns out that Schirmer and some other publishers are now
courting composers because they realize that once you have your own
computer engraving skills together (I haven’t; I’m awful at machines
and can barely do email), you can self-publish. And lots of composers
are doing that, because they think, “Why should you give your score
to these people—you may never see a cent out of the whole enter-
prise when you could take your piece and sell a score on email and
get something right away?” More and more young composers do just
that because now you can get your stuff distributed quite easily on the
Internet without having to go through all the nonsense of hoping that
a publisher takes you—and then actually does something with your
music, for which the publisher gets a huge percentage of the sales.
So then it suddenly behooves publishers to offer composers the ser-
vices that they can do as a regular thing. They’re courting composers
now, because they need to have some sort of continuation if they want
to go on as publishers, otherwise they’re going to be simply phased
out. They can’t just sit there anymore with that old-style hauteur—
“Well, we may deign to put your piece out in twenty years.” And
maybe when they do, nobody notices, and that’s because there was
usually no promotion. But if nowadays they are willing to promote,
set up the means of doing so, it can help a composer; my Berkeley
186 Shrude
composer was complaining that Schirmer wanted her to promote

the stuff that she’s already written, not giving her enough time to
write new pieces! So this is a sea change in the publishing world—if
Schirmer is doing that, then many others are trying to do it, too.
ms: If you are a house composer with a good publisher, it can be a good
thing.
wb: Uh, yes.
ms: But for the people who aren’t, you’d say self-publishing is really—
wb: I think the point right now is that publishers are going to have to
prove to composers that it really behooves the composer to go with a
publisher. I don’t think it’s necessarily better to be a house composer or
not, depending on who your publisher is. So many of them take on too
many composers and have too little time for any one. I was very, very
lucky in my years because I had had a very small firm work mostly
for me—and that’s Marks music, who also had Roger Sessions, but he
went on to Peters in the end. And so it turned out I would become their
“big guy.” The other person that sells at all is a much bigger seller; he
writes band music.
ms: Well, there’s enough of those guys.
wb: It comes out in reams from this composer. But band music sells like
hotcakes, you know.
ms: How important are multiple performances?
wb: I think very. I think it is a good idea to go to some of them. I try not
to when it’s a piece I’ve heard twenty times. But it’s interesting that
recently I’ve had to be again as a performer, as I was when much
younger. My Orphée-Sérénade has been done a lot. And I just did a
performance with the Radio Orchestra Utrecht in April, in that city.
The theme of the concert was composers who perform, and Susan
Botti came and did her Echo Tempo, all conducted by my friend H. K.
Gruber (known to everyone as Nali), also the composer of Franken-
stein!!, which he has performed as chansonnier many times. (I’ve also
croaked my way through the chansonnier part a few times myself.) He
was contrabassist with the Vienna Radio Orchestra and has become
a wonderful conductor, now having a rapidly growing career. And it
was a terrific concert. Joan and I did some of the Cabaret Songs, Nali
conducted two of his own pieces, and it was all terrific. A wonderful,
interesting, fun, composerish evening, with the sad note that it was the
very last performance that orchestra is going to be giving, ever. With
taxes, costs, and so on, the Dutch government decided it couldn’t
afford the orchestra anymore. Well, that’s increasingly happening
in Europe, too, because once the state support disappears there’s no
background of private funding to fall back on—when something goes,
there’s no way to replace it. So, that was the sad part. So I’m still play-
ing some of my old stuff, you know.
And I did get to hear three performances of some of my pieces I

haven’t heard for awhile at Marlboro. Sometimes pieces evolve on
their own; sometimes you’ll find that over the years, a piece that has
been done that was very difficult and very hard for people to take care
of twenty years ago now can be played as if second nature. A notable
case was the Juilliard doing the Carter Second Quartet, once thought
impenetrable, a few years ago at Tanglewood. They have played that
piece so long that now it’s clear and quite approachable. Performance
really does matter!
ms: During a lesson in your studio, what’s the typical modus operandi?
Student comes in, you look at their—
wb: Sometimes a student comes with nothing and needs to talk and—
well, if they have something to say about their lives, that’s fine, but
not for too long. I’m not a shrink. I don’t think I’m paid well enough
for that. Besides—
ms: Sit down, look at the music, play it at the piano?
wb: I don’t want them to call me about their sexual problems at 3 o’clock
in the morning. That doesn’t mean it has nothing to do with their work,
but in the end that’s their problem. You know, your problem as a student
is to write your music and come to me and show it. I try to get them to
play it, if they will and can play it.
ms: Instead of you playing it, which is much easier, actually?
wb: Sure, but you learn more what they want to do when they play it
themselves; often I want them to be able to at least play well enough
so they can hear what they’ve got. Of course, it’s true now they do it
on the software, and it plays it back and it’s awful. The MIDI has had
a very deleterious effect on orchestration because it flattens everything
out. They don’t know that a low flute isn’t as loud as a high one, be-
cause the MIDI version is all the same dynamic—and then when they
orchestrate, the music sounds flat and un-alive. One of the reasons I
think most master’s degree orchestra pieces are over-orchestrated is
because composers don’t have much experience with real orchestras.
They have a score page with twenty staves or so: “I’ve got all these
staves, I better fill them up!” So you kind of warn them against that. I
say, “You know, try to personalize the people in the orchestra and write
for them. Try to remember that this is a flesh-and-blood clarinetist who
will pick up their instrument and play me. It’s not just a note being
played; it’s somebody playing it.” Here’s a story about my Berkeley-
based composer who had never orchestrated before—she said she
wanted to enter a concerto competition with her own piece.
ms: Oh yeah, I’ve heard that piece.
wb: That was the first time she ever orchestrated, so she said, “What do I
do?” And I said, “Well, you’ve got the books; they’ll tell you what you
need. Pester players with questions about their instruments—they’re
188 Shrude
always eager to tell you things. And then just jump in with both feet.”
And she was fine. Now her orchestral music is played everywhere.
ms: Have you changed your approach to teaching in the last twenty
years?
wb: Well, I don’t necessarily have to find out whether they’re performing
anymore because most of them all seem to be. And most of them seem
to have the most amazing interests. They find a way to connect—one
of them now who is getting a doctorate got very much involved with
Brazilian popular music and is not even Brazilian. It’s infused in ev-
erything she ever wrote. So I think that you’re finding that people do
come in a little more cognizant of what brought them into music. And
that, I think, is the biggest change. So, I mean that’s really a change,
because of the fact that they don’t have the same needs that they did
thirty years ago.
ms: Is it important for students to study with the same teacher for a
length of time?
wb: I think it’s better to trade around.
ms: Better to trade around?
wb: Trade around. In general I think it’s good to have everybody’s ap-
proaches. But there are exceptions, where in a couple of cases I was
sent people who were into musical theater because the others hadn’t
had that experience. When I was first here in the 1970s, I’d be sent the
really young hotshots, like two freshmen that came the same year, one
destined for Broadway and the other more varied in his interests. Or
the grad students see me as the last stop on the way out, because by
that time they are theoretically ready to try to face the world out there,
and our department figured I’d be more worldly and knowledgeable
than someone else who had not put in his years at free-lance. I don’t
think that’s necessarily true now; Michael Daugherty and Bright Sheng
are if anything more on the scene than I at this point. I was asked to
give a course in the late seventies, Music Business and the Composer,
which I did twice. I am no good at business, but I know lots of people
in that end of things. So Joan and I gave a concert to raise money to
bring people out here to talk to composers about what it was like, being
in the music business. Many of them had been composers; a few of
them still were. A student wants to know, “What am I going to do to
make a living? You know, you can’t usually do it in composition, so
you’ve got to teach or something. And if there aren’t that may teach-
ing jobs, so what are my alternatives?” Some faculty would sit in to
hear the people I brought out; one colleague got really furious in one
of the classes. He couldn’t believe how the real world was. But now
the students often seem to be very aware of that world. And they are
also aware of the fact that, for a composer, continuing your habit of
composing is going to be a little like “feeding the monkey.” As heroin

addicts say, “You have this habit. How are you going to support it?”
ms: I’m going to skip the next two questions on technology, but is there
anything more you want to say about style? That’s a can of worms
right now.
wb: Oh boy, is it ever.
ms: But, if you can just give me a few words about that.
wb: I have been accused of having no style. [laughter] All my life.
ms: Well, you can write anything. You proved it when I heard the Songs
of Innocence and Experience. I thought, “This man can do anything.”
wb: But does it sound like me or not?
ms: It does, it sounds like you, but—
wb: Yeah, so, I mean, the whole point of—
ms: I mean, you could write a movie, you could do Broadway, you could
do twelve-tone. Yeah, it was all there.
wb: Well, that’s because the style comes from the person. But many people
opt to stick to one personality. You’ve heard the old foxes versus the
hedgehogs saying; it comes from the poet Archilocus, sixth-century B.C.,
who said the fox knows many things and the hedgehog only knows one
thing. There are great hedgehog composers and there are a lot of ter-
rible fox ones. You find out whether you are the one or the other kind
of person, and you have to operate on that evidence. I was one of those
people who had to do everything, so I did. And somebody else didn’t,
and they don’t have to, and they shouldn’t. Do what’s right for you.
ms: So style—
wb: It depends on who you are.
ms: Go with it.
wb: I do think that style is something that people used to worry a lot
about—it used to be that everybody was worried about originality.
You’ve got to find your style and find your own voice. So much talk
about finding your own voice. I think your voice finds you, in the
end.
ms: And it takes a long time.
wb: It takes awhile. With everybody. But younger composers are suffering
over it. Some people thought they’d be better with a brand on every-
thing, so everyone will know this is their piece. So they put a musical
stamp on every piece, which turns out in most cases to be exactly the
same stamp that everybody else was using, so therefore everybody
in that period sounded the same.
ms: I want to ask you this one: Has there been any one composer who’s
been particularly influential on the music that’s composed today?
wb: In the world?
ms: I mean, who comes to mind to you?
190 Shrude
wb: Oh, for the young people, or for anybody in the world? Name one
person?
ms: Either.
wb: For me?
ms: Who comes—who pops into your head?
wb: Nobody, everybody.
ms: Nobody.
wb: Everybody.
ms: Everybody.
wb: I don’t know. For example, Stravinsky used to have much more influ-
ence than he does today. But then there are always revivals—people say-
ing how terrific he is; maybe Stravinsky might now have the influence
that Tchaikovsky once had. No surprise! They’re certainly very much of
the same stripe—that fantastic technical excellence. I mean, there’s no
clearer orchestrator than, there’s nothing unheard in, Tchaikovsky. Next
to him Brahms is a big, muddy ooze—a few details, some of them come
out; much is lost. But people used to think that Brahms was great be-
cause he was muddy, then Tchaikovsky isn’t great because he’s clear.
ms: Yes, he is clear.
wb: And that, I think, is the whole problem for a lot of people with my
music. Ours is a Germanic pedagogy by and large; I was trained in
the French way mostly, not the German. Not that I don’t love and
revere and honor Beethoven. For example. I’m not a big Wagnerian;
Bruckner I can barely stand. But some people either do or don’t be-
lieve in the Germanic way as being more profound. I don’t. To me it’s
all making music.
ms: Yeah. That’s true. Well, I think we can stop there. I have a few other
questions, but you’ve covered most of the territory. That’s great.
wb: Okay. Let’s go have some lunch.
NOTE
The above conversation took place in Bolcom’s Ann Arbor home on August 27, 2005.
This is the third in a series in which Shrude asks the same questions of living composers.
The previous two conversations were with Milton Babbitt (vol. 25, no. 3) and Samuel
Adler (vol. 26, no. 2).

A Conversation With William Bolcom

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A Conversation With William Bolcom

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Teaching Composition in Twenty-First-Century America: A Conversation with William

A composer-saxophonist now on our jazz faculty came in with this

a rich tradition that is worth knowing—I’m a huge fan of early piano

did him in as a composer, no matter what he said. I mean, he’s still

work. I prescribed three semesters of strict counterpoint; this person

composer was complaining that Schirmer wanted her to promote

And I did get to hear three performances of some of my pieces I

composing is going to be a little like “feeding the monkey.” As heroin

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