King of the Sonic Sphere

“I want to make William Bolcom as much of a household name as Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein,” says VocalEssence director Philip Brunelle. “He’s one of the greatest living American composers.” To that end, Brunelle is spearheading Illuminating Bolcom, a two-week festival of concerts and other events that includes the heavy hitters in the Twin Cities’ classical music scene—VocalEssence, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Minnesota Opera, and the Schubert Club, among others.

This is not the first such festival VocalEssence has sponsored. “Every six or seven years it’s important to do more than a single concert,” says Brunelle, “but we’ve never done anything on this scale.” It might seem nightmarish to coordinate so many diverse aesthetics, schedules, and egos, but Brunelle says the festival was easy to organize. “Not one organization I talked to said, ‘Who’s Bolcom?’ or ‘I don’t know.’ They were all enthusiastic.”

Bolcom, sixty-nine, says he’s “flabbergasted by the energy being invested in the festival.” The four-time Grammy-winning composer deflects some of Brunelle’s praise by shifting the discussion to other prominent composers who are, coincidentally, also sixty-nine years old, including John Harbison, John Corigliano, and Joan Tower. “I am part of that group,” says Bolcom. “We have endured.”

Bolcom is not a stranger to the Twin Cities. Throughout the 1970s, Dennis Russell Davies frequently programmed his compositions for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. In 1979, Bolcom worked at the Guthrie Theater on a production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, completing a score for the work that his teacher, Darius Milhaud, hadn’t finished before he died.

Last summer, Bolcom was in town accompanying his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, in a program of theater songs for the Schubert Club’s Summer Festival of Song. His skills as a pianist and a composer were on display. Morris sang several of his cabaret songs, eclectic blendings of show tunes, popular music, and classical art songs, many of which will be featured in one of the festival’s concerts.

The area premiere of Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a monumental, forty-six-song setting of William Blake’s poetry, is the centerpiece of the festival. The massive work calls for more than 400 musicians—and not just classical musicians, but also rock, bluegrass, and folk musicians, many of whom are from the local music community. Live video and projected images of Blake’s illustrations will accompany the singing, creating a multimedia experience.

“Songs is my major work,” Bolcom says. “I discovered Blake while a sophomore in college [in 1956]. I started working on it then—the chaotic opening is from that time. But I was not ready to handle the breadth of the work. I started compiling sketches and was surprised at the different styles. I just let myself be pulled in different directions.” Twenty-five years later, in 1981, he completed the work.

It was, in part, through Bolcom’s songs that Brunelle first became familiar with his music. “I’ve accompanied any number of singers who programmed his songs,” Brunelle says. “I’ve also seen his operas at Chicago Lyric and at the Met. And his symphonies are frequently played by the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic.” Though Brunelle didn’t meet Bolcom until the late 1990s, the idea for this festival has been gestating in his mind ever since he attended a performance of Bolcom’s Songs in St. Louis in 1992. “I knew the minute I heard it that I had to do it,” Brunelle says. “The song cycle is the most amazing survey of American musical styles, from one extreme to the other—from reggae to country to folk to atonal. It’s everything. And it’s a fantastic experience for listeners to travel through that sonic sphere.”

“There were lots of eclectics before me,” Bolcom says. “Mozart, Bach, they composed in lots of styles and no one seemed to mind.” He describes the notion of patenting a style and sticking to it as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. “That’s too restrictive for me. I’m interested in everything. They all go together in my mind. Each style has integrity, and you have to love them all.” April 12–May 5. Various locations

Reach William Randall Beard at randybeard@hotmail.com.