PHILLIP RAMEY:  When did you begin to compose?

PAUL BOWLES:  I started as a small child, with songs.  At one point I thought I was writing an opera.  It was titled Le Carré and subtitled "an opera in nine chapters," so you can see how, even then, I got my arts mixed up.  The plot concerned two men who decide to exchange wives.  The setting was Stanley, in the Falkland Islands.  This was just after the First World War and nobody had ever heard of the Falklands.  Nor had I, except that I found them on a map.  

What was your early training?

I had two lessons a week, one in piano, the other in ear-training and theory.  I wrote some small piano pieces at that time, when I was eight or nine.  What I liked particularly was popular music, so I tried to write Broadway-like tunes.  Of course they were no good.  Nothing I composed then was any good.  Naturally.   

How did it happen that you were able to study with Aaron Copland?

Henry Cowell arranged that. I met Aaron in late 1929, when I was eighteen.  Of course, I knew of him because of the Copland-Sessions Concerts, but I had never heard a note of his music.  

You came to admire him as a composer?

At that age I think that if one admires at all one admires wholeheartedly, and I did.  He seemed to me the ideal of what a composer should be because he knew exactly why he put down every note.  

Aaron once told me that you were hardly an exemplary student. 

True.  He gave me figured basses to do every day, and we analyzed Mozart sonatas.  I didn't enjoy any of it.  Who would?  It was no fun.  Aaron used to shrug his shoulders and say, "If you don't work now when you're twenty, no one will love you when you're thirty."  Aaron also called me "militantly non-professional."  I love that word militant—I suppose he meant anti-academic, which I certainly was.  But learning meant studying.  (I did, however, compose my little Sonata for Oboe and Clarinet when I was with him in Morocco in 1931, but I didn't consider that to be work.)  I thought that I could do what I wanted to do without any rigorous training.  

Is that why you refused studies with two important figures of twentieth-century music, Nadia Boulanger and Sergei Prokofiev?

Of course.  The key word there is study.  It's a dirty word.  

Did you think they might be too-strict taskmasters?  

I could tell from Boulanger's personality that she would be strict.  I had never met Prokofiev, but I had a Russian friend in Paris, Madame Daniloff, who knew him, and she said she would arrange for me to see him.  I liked his music very much, especially a ballet I had seen performed by the Diaghilev company, Pas d'Acier, but the idea of meeting him frightened me.  Nonetheless, Madame Daniloff made an appointment for three o'clock the following Monday.  That day, after lunch, I found myself packing suitcases and taking a taxi to the Gare de l'Est.  I bought a ticket to the farthest destination, which was Saverne in Alsace, and got on the train.  I don't know what was the matter with me.  

You didn't even want to meet Prokofiev? 

No, because if I had then he might have accepted me as a student.  Later, we exchanged letters, and he wrote me something like, "I am sorry that you were prevented from coming to see me last May, but I should like to warn you against the people you are seeing in America.  Music is not headed in that direction."  I had mentioned Copland to Prokofiev, and when I showed Aaron the letter he loved it.  He laughed and laughed.  I finally did meet Prokofiev in New York in 1936, just before he returned to Russia for good.  At lunch he was serious and forbidding, and never smiled.  Perhaps he was worried.  I thought he was mad to go back.  

Musically, you are a self-confessed miniaturist, primarily a composer of brief, episodic pieces.

For me, short, simple pieces were the most satisfying, perhaps because I didn't know how to appreciate long, complex ones.  I wasn't certain how such pieces were made.  

But didn't you want to find out?  You weren't stupid.

It was not a question of intelligence.  I'm not complaining that I was dumb.  I think that, largely, it was a matter of what Gertrude Stein called self-sufficiency.  

You never desired to create large-scale works—a symphony, for instance?  

No!  I didn't think in those terms at all.  My ideal was to write small pieces with only as many notes as absolutely necessary; pieces which could be listened to many times and would be fun to hear.  I admit that's rather limiting.  Formally, those pieces scarcely exist.  As a composer, I think of myself as someone as marginal as Louis Moreau Gottschalk or Reynaldo Hahn.  

Is that part of your philosophy, that composing music and listening to it should be fun?

Of course.  What else is there in life but fun?  

Some composers of my acquaintance say that writing music is an agony.  

[Laughing] If they want agony, that's fine.   

What do you see as the function, if any, of concert music?

First, I suppose, it has to entertain.  When one hears the word entertainment, one thinks of show biz, but of course that isn't it.  Music should engage the attention of the listener and make him more aware of what sound can do to him.  

Just that?  You don't think that concert music might have, in the old Teutonic-Romantic sense, some high moral purpose?

None whatever.  Good concert music expounds the philosophy of sound: where sounds come from and what they do.   

By citing an entertainment factor, are you suggesting populism?

No.  I'm presupposing a sophisticated ear.  The unsophisticated ear—the so-called man in the street—will probably not be in a concert hall.  

Did you take any pleasure in the ultra-sophisticated programs that the League of Composers gave in New York in the 1930s and 1940s?

Not unless they played a piece of mine, which was seldom.  But, then, I think my music was more entertaining than the other things they were presenting, which tended to be by the academic crowd.  By entertaining I mean easy to listen to.  Those were highly specialized concerts.  The general public never attended them.  

The music they played was deadly serious, with little charm?  

Yes, and there is no entertainment without charm.  

But others might consider, for instance, an earnest Beethoven quartet entertaining.  

[Laughing]  You're not interviewing those others.  

Why do you find Beethoven's music distasteful?  

For one thing, because you have to wait so long for it to change.  

Is it too serious and determined for you, not episodic enough?  

Probably.  

Of course, generally speaking, Beethoven was uninterested in charming the listener.  More in impressing him.  

Ah, I was afraid of that!  

You don't care for impressive, self-important music.

How could I?  In my own music I never liked to raise my voice.  It was often more in the manner of an aside.  That's partly why I prefer French music to German.  The French were not striving to be impressive.  It was something else they sought: exactitude of tone, starting with Couperin and continuing to Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc.  The German aesthetic is foreign to me.  

So you have never attempted to write any "serious," "impressive" music.  

It would embarrass me too much.  I would be ashamed of it.  It would be like writing prose that seeks to impress.  

Then your music is not meant to be taken seriously?

I don't mind if other people take it seriously, but I don't.  I certainly never intended it to be impressive.  But, of course, you can take the lightest piano piece of Satie seriously.  

Although Copland had his lighter side, basically he was a serious composer.  I know that you admire many of his works, especially the Piano Variations.

Aaron was very serious, and most of his music is meant to be impressive.  It expounds, often using rhetoric familiar from the nineteenth century, even from Beethoven.  The Piano Variations is my favorite of all his serious concert music, and certainly its gestures are meant to impress the listener.  But I admire the Variations for another reason: as I listen, I am aware of every detail of its construction; its beams and struts are beautifully visible, unmarred by any ornamentation.  You cannot say that about "impressive" music by Germanic composers such as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Jan Sibelius.  

I knew you didn't like Mahler, but I didn't realize you felt strongly about Strauss and Sibelius.  

To my mind, Richard Strauss is a perfect example of what shouldn't be.  

I remember Copland saying that during the 1920s and 1930s he considered Sibelius to be "the Enemy." 

As far as I'm concerned, you can have all seven of his symphonies, with my compliments.  

Sibelius is said to have composed an eighth symphony and then destroyed it.

He finally caught on.  

Am I right in thinking that Igor Stravinsky is your favorite composer?  

Yes, although I don't suppose I would put him ahead of Johann Sebastian Bach.  But certainly ahead of anybody in the past two centuries.  

I think it's extraordinary the way Stravinsky kept reinventing himself.   

So do I.  When I was a kid, I liked the early Russian phase, especially L'Oiseau de Feu.  But the later neo-classic works seem to be more solid and interesting, for instance, the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments—a great piece.  I very much admire Stravinsky's intellect.  I think he was brighter than other composers and you find that quality especially in the neoclassic scores.  He had a wonderful gift for orchestration, perverse orchestration.  He made the instruments sound as they hadn't sounded before, by using the "wrong" registers, by which I mean unusual registers.  And his music was emotionally cool, which I appreciate.  

As a young man, were you bowled over by Le Sacre du Printemps?  

Of course.  Like everyone else.  Except that the first time I heard the music I had the misfortune to see it danced, by Martha Graham.  If I'd just been listening to an orchestral performance, I probably would have been even more bowled over by Le Sacre.  But there was this visual thing on top of it that got in the way of enjoyment.  

The awkward, even grotesque gestures of Martha Graham?   

Which didn't necessarily come out of the music.  Someone else could have made other gestures that might have been more in keeping with it.  

What are some of your other favorite Stravinsky works?

The Gluck-like, very end-of-the-eighteenth-century Apollo, which holds together beautifully from beginning to end.  Le Baiser de la Fée—so very Tchaikovsky without being Tchaikovsky. Les Noces.  The Symphonies of Wind Instruments, the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements.  

Oedipus Rex?

No, because I don't like vocal music.  Also, it sounds to me like fake Stravinsky.  And that old recording is so ridiculous, with Jean Cocteau coming in every few minutes, crying in French:  "The terrible things that have happened to Thebes!" 

How about the late, serial-inflected pieces, such as the Requiem Canticles?

No, no, no, no.  I don't like his twelve-tone music.  It's as though someone had rewritten some Schoenberg to sound like Stravinsky.  It's Stravinsky-orchestrated, so you couldn't really mistake it.  But even so, the material is so sad.  Stravinsky went out of his way not to make the kind of music he would naturally make.  

Did you ever meet him?

Yes, once.  In Symphony Hall, Boston, in what was probably Serge Koussevitzky's salon.  He seemed very civilized, not eccentric in any way.  We had tea, and he poured it for me from a teapot.  I liked that.  

I had a dream about Stravinsky last night.  We were in the same hotel and I went to his room to see him because I wanted to hear certain of his pieces with which I was unfamiliar.  He said, "It's all right, I have them on compact discs and will lend them to you, but just for a day."  For some reason I had brought my parrot with me.  It was screaming its head off and I kept yelling, "Shut up!"  Stravinsky just smiled, a very ironic smile, as though he knew ahead of time how I would react to the music.  He told me the titles of the pieces, but I had never heard any of them.  I carried the CDs down the hall in my right hand and the parrot's cage in my left.  I didn't know where to put the parrot, but finally left it on the balcony, where it continued to scream so loudly that it was impossible to listen to the music.  So I never heard anything, but Stravinsky did at least lend me the CDs.  

Of course in his day there were no compact discs.  

No.  But it might just as well have been Mozart, agreeing to let me have his player-piano rolls.  

Concerning your unusual dual careers in music and prose:  you once mentioned that you thought they involved different parts of the brain.  

Who knows how the mind is divided?  I always found it a great relief to write if I had been composing; and if I had been writing it was wonderful to sit down and compose.  

Why do you suppose your prose is so often "dark," your music light?  

Perhaps because I didn't know how to compose "dark" music.  

Did you ever try?  

Once—in 1931, in Berlin.  It was a piano piece, now lost [see: Sixty Years in Limbo: the Rediscovery of Tamanar], called Tamanar, named after a place down in southern Morocco where the High Atlas mountains fall into the Atlantic Ocean.  The music was loud and sinister, by which I mean the harmony was sinister—dissonant and heavy.  When I worked at it, people would begin screaming, "Fenster zu!" (Shut the window!) across the courtyard, threatening to call the police.  They didn't want to hear such a racket.  

Ultimately, your serious side came out in your books.  

Certainly not in my musical compositions.  Lenny Bernstein always said that my music sounded post-coital.  

Your fiction is full of horrific incidents that might, in a sense, be considered gestural.  They catch the reader's attention somewhat in the way musical gestures catch the listener's.  

But I don't think that's so shameful in prose because it's connected with the meaning of the story.  

Copland once told me that you wrote "engaging music that had its own style, though it wasn't demandingly moderne."  He also said, "I've never known Paul to write a dull piece."  

I don't object to that.  Would you?  Though my music certainly wasn't trying to be "modern," and Aaron never suggested that I write dissonant music.  He would point out my failings, but apparently they were technical rather than stylistic.  

Do you compose sequentially, from beginning to end?  

Always.  

Copland often did not work that way.  He would compose bits and pieces of a movement and eventually fit them together so that everything was coherent.  

That wouldn't work for me.  That's a synthetic way I couldn't manage.  

In that sense, Copland's approach to composition was more intellectual than yours.  

It would have to be.  

I know you seldom revise your prose, for you are intent on getting things right the first time.  But did you make major revisions in your musical scores?   

No.  I would have lost everything if I had.  

How much influence has jazz had on your music?

A lot of Copland is strictly out of jazz, but I never used it.  Even if one loves jazz, it is very difficult to have anything to do with it.  By jazz, you mean American Black music.  As a composer, I was always careful to stay away from it because I wasn't black and, thus, wouldn't have been able to get the exact effect.  

Although you have written a great many songs, I suspect that your real forte is instrumental music.  

That's true, because instrumental music is not so damned human.  When I listen to music I don't want to be reminded of human beings all the time, and when someone is singing you can't help but be.  You have a mental image of either a man or a woman with an open mouth, and it's not pleasant.  I hate most vocal Western art music, although I don't mind choral music.  I do not like listening to art songs.