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 faculty 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 important 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—everybody 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, musically?" 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 certainly true with that big wasteland of twentieth-century unperformable 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 possible 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 composer-saxophonist now on our jazz faculty came in with this very desiccated stuff, and after a few weeks I said...