American experience

When the eminent American composer William Bolcom appears this afternoon in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, you might expect him to be doing something composer-like, such as studying a score or conducting his work or lecturing professorially on his music. Instead, Bolcom will be tickling the ivories of a grand piano and skating joyfully through standards of the American songbook by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern and others, while his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, soars above him on the vocals. If his teachers could see him now.

After all, Bolcom, 64, came of age when an austere musical modernism reigned in academic circles, and young composers were taught to shun popular styles. Half a lifetime later, the composer and his wife have been performing and recording the American song repertory for 30 years, and, most heretically of all, Bolcom has integrated his flair for the musical vernacular into the deepest levels of his own compositions. He has built a career as a true American eclectic, writing works that zigzag between the worlds of high and low, “serious” and popular music.

The full range of Bolcom’s musical lexicon is on display through this week as the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival honors him, and this Wednesday and Thursday presents the West Coast premiere of his “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” -- an epic, evening-long setting of the famous cycle of poetry by William Blake. In true Bolcom fashion, the work ricochets among rock and jazz, country and classical, folk and reggae. That list suggests a giant melting pot of American music, and that, according to Bolcom, is exactly the point.

“There is a need in our culture to integrate ourselves with ourselves,” the composer explained recently by phone from South Carolina, where he was on tour. “We live in a fragmented, market-oriented culture, where people feel some deep, probably unspoken need to be part of a larger group or body politic. Particularly in today’s time of crisis, it’s all about finding how the different parts relate. As a composer, that has been my mission -- to find how many connections can be made from disparate styles. I don’t look at myself as an eclectic as much as somebody who’s involved with a higher synthesis.”

Bolcom is quick to point out that since the time of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” in the 17th century, composers have been borrowing from the contemporary forms of their day. It was only within the last 150 years that high and low have become so starkly separated, and that classical music was expected to inhabit a rarified realm of its own.

A kindred spirit

Having the long historical view, however, did not help the composer much when he was studying in Paris in the 1950s, a time when well-schooled music necessarily conformed to rigorous theories of atonality and -- suffice it to say -- sounded not a bit like show tunes. But even as composers of the day like Boulez and Stockhausen were pushing music to higher and higher degrees of sophistication and abstraction, the young Bolcom was incubating plans to take his music in a very different direction. In fact, the seeds of Bolcom’s dissent had been sown years earlier at the tender age of 17 through an experience that, curiously enough, was not musical at all but literary. He had fallen in love with the poetry of Blake.

More specifically, Bolcom had discovered the poet’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” published in 1794 and shot through with Blake’s insights into the mysteries of the human soul, the accumulation of worldly wisdom and the philosophical passage from youth to adulthood. The composer was struck by more than just its ideas; he was amazed by the staggering array of voices the poet captured.

“At every point Blake used his whole culture, past and present, high-flown and vernacular, as sources,” Bolcom observed in a program note. “Exercises in elegant Dryden-esque diction are placed cheek by jowl with ballads that could have come from one of the ‘songsters’ of his day.... It is as if many people from all walks of life were speaking, each in a different way. The apparent disharmony of each clash and juxtaposition eventually produces a deeper and more universal harmony ....””

In other words, whether or not he had the means to articulate it as a teenager, Bolcom had discovered in Blake the template for his own future musical identity. Once he began setting the poems, he quickly realized they would require a range of musical voices commensurate with Blake’s poetic voices. “At first I was actually shocked and thought, ‘I can’t be doing this,’ ” he said, “but I had an inner need to do it.”

And so he continued his setting of the epic cycle, reaching by turns for all the different styles of music he heard around him. Bolcom later went off to study with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen in Paris and put the work on hold, but when he eventually settled in Ann Arbor to teach composition at the University of Michigan, he returned to the project, completing it in 1982, some 25 years after its inception. The American premiere took place on campus in April 1984. In the packed audience that day was a young conductor named Carl St.Clair.

“I was awestruck,” said St.Clair, vividly recalling the experience almost two decades later from his home in Orange County. In the intervening years, St.Clair has become music director of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra, and this week’s performances are the fulfillment of a longtime dream of bringing the work to West Coast audiences. “I thought that it was the greatest piece ever written by an American composer,” he said. “Every few minutes you were experiencing a completely new sonic world. It was like being on a bullet train and watching the scenery go flying by without even having to move.”

Steady stream of work

A MAJOR composing career, of course, is not made from a single success, no matter how much work has gone into it. Over the years, Bolcom has also churned out a steady stream of symphonies, concertos and chamber music in varying styles that have earned two Guggenheim fellowships as well as a Pulitzer Prize. But not surprisingly given his interest in song, Bolcom has kept opera and musical theater as twin compass points in his quest to find the quintessential American sound.

The composer’s stage interest dates back to his school days in Paris, where Milhaud gave him a libretto by American poet Arnold Weinstein called “Dynamite Tonite.” Bolcom was immediately drawn to it, and got to work setting the text. He even had the audacity to perform some of his newly minted excerpts between atonal pieces for a jury at the Paris Conservatory that included Messiaen and Henri Dutilleux. “Messiaen looked very bemused when I started singing ‘one little bomb and boom!’ ” he recalled.

But the opera went on to win an award and, most important, cemented a productive relationship with Weinstein that has lasted to the present. Over the course of the following decades, the two men collaborated on nearly 100 original cabaret songs, as well as on the stage works “Greatshot” (1969) and “Casino Paradise” (1990). They have also produced two major works for Chicago Lyric Opera, “McTeague” (1992) and “A View From the Bridge” (1999). A third is on the way, based on Robert Altman’s film “A Wedding.”

Of all of Bolcom’s recent work, “View” has received the most widespread attention. Adapted from Arthur Miller’s classic tale of Italian Americans in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1950s, the opera offers a rich, Bolcom-esque stew of pungent chromaticism and urbane jazzy harmonies out of which emerge catchy Broadway-style melodies, tangos and whatever else the composer could organically conjure up. And unlike most contemporary operas, which seldom find recordings or subsequent performances after their initial premiere, “View” may yet stick around. The work has been recorded on New World Records, the Lyric’s striking production enjoyed seven performances at the Met last December, and Bolcom recently returned from Hagen, Germany, where he oversaw rehearsals for a new German-language version of the opera. Another production is in the works in Portland, Ore.

If “A View From the Bridge” is earning Bolcom acclaim through its wide exposure, “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” has been more of a shadow masterpiece, lurking on the margins of his growing fame. Tapes of an early performance once circulated among critics, but the piece has never been commercially recorded and, according to St.Clair, it has been performed by only five other professional orchestras. This is almost certainly a result of its prohibitive size and scope: It lasts well over two hours and is scored for 11 soloists, three choruses, a large orchestra and a battery of folk and jazz instruments.

With so many forces assembled on stage, one can easily imagine a work whose music overpowers the subtle and nuanced poetry that lies beneath, but for Bolcom, Blake’s message was too important to disguise.

The poetic cycle, after all, was written at the time of the French Revolution, when American society was in its infancy. The composer has never been one to shy away from a political opinion, and he sees Blake’s probing exploration of innocence and experience -- or what the poet called “the two contrary states of the human soul” -- as a prescient, cautionary tale that speaks louder than ever in today’s world.

“We’re at a point where we as a nation are refusing to grow up,” Bolcom said with audible exasperation. “We’re the richest and most powerful nation in the world and we’re acting like a bunch of 5-year-olds. We’re dreadfully frightened about handling the responsibility of who we are, and I think Blake has an answer to this. He helps us understand where we can begin to integrate our society.”

Amplifying that answer through his music is Bolcom’s chief goal. It is ultimately his own way of making connections not just between disparate strains of American music, but also between starkly contrasting visions of what this country is and what it could be. Or as he once wrote in a program note, “If I have caused a more careful listening of Blake’s message, then my work over a span of 25 years will not have been in vain.”

*

‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’

When: Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m.

Where: Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

Price: $19-$59

Contact: (714) 556-2787