If you were a creative artist—composer, writer, dramatist, musician—during the middle of the 20th century, you knew the work of Paul Bowles. If you were an international insider, you probably vacationed at his Moroccan lodgings. His arc of influence left no art form and no intriguing personality untouched, and sooner or later the gifted and celebrated found their way to his Tangier hideaway. Known to mainstream audiences as the author of The Sheltering Sky and renowned among art world cognoscenti as an innovative composer, Bowles led a charmed and utterly independent life on three continents. To celebrate 100th anniversary of his birth, UCSC will host performers, filmmakers and scholars to celebrate “all things Bowles” this weekend, Feb. 4-6. All lectures, readings, exhibitions and performances are free and open to the public.
An expatriate for most of his long life, Paul Bowles was an influential icon of life sculpted against the grain of mainstream values and codes. Ever the free spirit, Paul Bowles’ life defined glamor. A member of Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon between the wars, the petite fair-haired Bowles had been a music critic in New York, studied composition with Aaron Copland and made his first visit to Tangier—all before he was 21 years old. During the 1930s and 40s he became close friends with other American intellectuals such as Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams, continued writing experimental music under the mentorship of Virgil Thomson, wrote dance music for Merce Cunningham that was conducted by Leonard Bernstein and translated a play by Jean-Paul Sartre that was directed by John Huston on the New York stage. Yes, a charmed life indeed.
Moroccan Mystique
After a bohemian marriage to writer Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles moved permanently to Tangier and wrote the work for which he is best known, The Sheltering Sky, an existential study of three Americans and the psychological erosion of their lives during a journey across the scorching Algerian desert. Even as his literary fame grew, Bowles continued to compose music for theater—often as vibrant, jazz-influenced and playful as his writing was darkly pessimistic. And for half a century he played host to an expanding company of artistic and gay expatriates who flocked to Tangier, including Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsburg and William S. Burroughs. Bowles seemed to know everyone interesting, from Jean Cocteau and Benjamin Britten to Werner Herzog and Paul Theroux.
Inspired by the rich and exotic culture of Morocco, Bowles began to explore the indigenous musical traditions, traveling the countryside recording music and stories performed by native creators. Jane Bowles died in the early 1970s, and Paul lived on in Morocco, giving his final interview, in 1999, to Santa Cruz musician Irene Herrmann, who became the executor of his musical estate upon his death later that year.
Treasure Hunt
Thanks to Herrmann, many of the songs, concerti and works for piano created by Bowles will be performed this weekend at UCSC as part of a three-day festival to honor his centennial. Brian Staufenbiel and Patrice McGinnis will perform West Coast premieres of rare songs; the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery will exhibit memorabilia, letters, photographs and scores; and Cowell College will host filmmakers, poets, historians and literary scholars who will offer their insights and analyses of Bowles’ contribution to international creativity.
“It started as a treasure hunt,” Herrmann says of her quest for Bowles and his music. “Any American music student knows Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, and over the years of my own study the name ‘Paul Bowles’ kept popping up.” Virgil Thomson, for whom Bowles wrote music criticism at the New York Herald Tribune, said of Bowles’ work as a composer: “Paul Bowles’s songs are enchanting for their sweetness of mood, their lightness of texture, for in general their way of being wholly alive and right. . . . The texts fit their tunes like a peach in its skin.”
“It was hard to find his music,” Herrmann recalls, “and that made it all the more tantalizing.” In 1990 Herrmann tracked down a few of Bowles’ more well-known piano pieces. Her interest was now kindled, but the trail grew cold, fast. “The music was either out of print or had never been published,” she says.
Sifting through some of his writings, his music and old photos at an archive at the University of Texas, Herrmann “started to get to know his music and the people who knew him.” It was sheer luck, she admits, when she contacted Phillip Ramey, who had lived in the same apartment building as Bowles for half of each year. “He was the gatekeeper to gain access to Paul. He recognized that I was serious, and he too saw that Paul considered himself primarily a musician and that needed to be exposed to the wider world.”
A Friendship Born
An accomplished accompanist, music teacher and ensemble performer on piano, cello and mandolin, Herrmann knew she absolutely had to meet the man himself. And in 1991 she went to Morocco, not knowing exactly where the trail would lead. “But I came bearing him musical gifts,” she says: Bowles’ own “lost” compositions. The recollection brings a smile to her face. “I played his own music for him—music he had never heard performed.” After a three-week stay, their friendship had begun. She liked the man himself—“very much,” she admits. “He was incredibly alert, soft-spoken, almost epigrammatic, but always spot-on in his comments and insights. Politics, literature, poetry, language—he knew so much.”
The man she met had fallen in love with Morocco. “He liked the life, the music. There was a very sophisticated group of seasonal residents.” Tangier was famous for its exotic architecture and cultural life, its brilliant colors and heightened sunlight, all of which attracted Matisse as well as Yves Saint Laurent. It was also famous for its laissez-faire society. American and European gay celebrities found acceptance, respite and each other in the heart of this Euro-Arab crossroads.
Herrmann aimed toward the centennial of Bowles’ birth to bring his little-known world out of the musical closet. “It was the perfect time. He was still in the cultural memory and I thought, ‘This really is the one chance to honor him,’” Herrmann says. “His writings are still current, and because I am his music executor I wanted to bring together all these people who knew him in all his various guises.”
At this weekend’s UCSC event, audiences will be able to hear Bowles’ music and meet the ethnomusicologists who will re-edit his collections. They’ll also be able to hear recitals of his music and see the long-lost film You Are Not I made from a Bowles short story in 1983, which will be brought from New York by independent filmmaker Sara Driver.
In addition to a screening of this rare, 48-minute black and white cinematic treatment of Bowles’ literary work, Herrmann is excited about three hour-long concerts that will include West Coast premieres of Bowles’ eclectic and graceful compositions. Six Piano Preludes (to be performed by Herrmann and Michael McGushin) offer Bowles as a quintessential American modernist, sparkling with jazz syncopation, expressionistic flights of fancy and atonal poetry. Friday, Ensemble Paralelle, led by Nicole Paiement, performs some of his rarest works. Part Gershwin, part folkloric, with inflections a la Satie, Bowles’ music bristles with vivacity in style, sound and tempo. Bowles was a restless composer of songs set to a broad swath of texts, from Lorca and Tennessee Williams to Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau.
A crowning achievement of Herrmann’s tri-continental efforts over the past several years is the large archives of Bowles’ music now housed in UCSC’s Special Collections. “Theater music, interviews, so much,” she enthuses, “and now it’s available to everyone to come and study right here in Santa Cruz.”
Pulling together this multi-media Paul Bowles event has been a labor of love for Irene Herrmann. But she confesses she’s glad it’s almost over. “Let’s just say I’ll be thrilled when he turns 101!”
THE PAUL BOWLES CENTENNIAL runs Friday-Sunday, Feb. 4-6 at UCSC with films, lectures, concerts and exhibitions. All events are free. For schedule visit http://bowles.ihr.ucsc.edu.
