William Bolcom
The Complete Rags for Piano
Seattle-born composer and pianist William Bolcom entered the University of Washington at age 11, studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and the Paris Conservatoire, and completed his doctorate in composition at Stanford University in 1964. Recent premieres of his compositions range from the opera McTeague at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992 (directed by Robert Altman) and Lyric Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (written for James Galway), to a Second Piano Quartet (for clarinetist Richard Stoltzman and the Beaux Arts Trio) and his Sixth Symphony (for the National Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin) last year. He scored John Turturro's new movie, Illuminata, and his new opera, View from the Bridge (libretto by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein) is due for premiere at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in October 1999. To date, Bolcom is featured on nearly 40 albums as both performer and composer (several of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards), as well as 20 made with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, with whom he tours worldwide. He has taught composition at the University of Michigan since 1973, where he is the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished Professor of Music. Awards include honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Albion College, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his Twelve New Etudes for Piano. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
One day in the fall of 1967 I had lunch with Norman Lloyd, then head of the music division for the Rockefeller Foundation, who mentioned having heard of a ragtime opera by Scott Joplin. Who is that? I asked few people in 1967 knew the name of Scott Joplin- and Norman told me Joplin was the composer of the "Maple Leaf Rag" but that his opera existed only in legend. For some reason I immediately went on the trail of Treemonisha, only to find that no one even at the Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, or the Schomburg Collection had it. That is, until I asked my colleague Rudi Blesh at Queens College; we had barely ever said hello before as we rushed in and out of the same office on the way to teaching, but one week I asked him if he knew where I could find a copy of the opera, as all the usual suspects had nothing. When he said "I have a copy of the vocal score-shall I bring it next week?" I nearly fell off my chair. From this happy event came an exploration of Joplin's rags (courtesy of Rudi's friend Max Morath) as well as of the whole field of turn-of-the-last-century piano ragtime. Soon after, Joshua Rifkin recorded the Joplin rags and Gunther Schuller laid the period instrumentations of Joplin onto disc in The Red Back Book album (which would become the source for the music of the film The Sting); Joplin's obscurity would be no more.
What may be less well-known is that from about 1968 on a whole group of young American composers, Peter Winkler, William Albright and several others, joined me in writing new traditional-style rags (even George Rochberg caught the fever in one of his piano suites). Bill Albright and I would send each other rags by mail like chess problems. It was all delightful for us (playing these new-old pieces in concert elicited warm responses from audiences), but I think we all felt the real impetus from our picking up a dropped thread of our emerging American tradition. Few of us would continue to write traditional rags after about 1975, but the Ragtime Revival was certainly the beginning of American composers' serious absorption of our own popular sources into our music in an unself-conscious way; by this I mean that where Gottschalk would figuratively wear the costumes of the ethnic musics he evoked, and Brooklyn-born Copland donned musical cowboy hats and overalls, we younger composers internalized rag (and other popular music) in such a way that our subsequent music became profoundly changed, whatever styles we each pursued later. I was particularly lucky in getting to know Eubie Blake- intimately what a wonderful teacher he was!-and it is with great pleasure that Albany Records, John Murphy, and I give "Knight Hubert" the posthumous accolade of naming this CD after the beloved James Hubert Blake.
The first CD in this set begins with the virtuoso rag Eubie's Luckey Day, a supercharged evocation of Eubie's "Charleston Rag" and Luckey Roberts' great stride pieces. The three "Ghost Rags," so named by the late piano virtuoso Paul Jacobs when he recorded them, begin with my still-most-famous work Graceful Ghost, written in memory of my father; The Poltergeist explores nearly every "frozen" appoggiatura and substitution in the harmonic book, and Paul called Dream Shadows a "white telephone rag," one that would not sound out of place in a Joan Crawford movie-drama. Raggin' Rudi celebrates the warm friendship my wife Joan Morris and I enjoyed with that pathfinding scholar of jazz and ragtime; it evokes the playful rags of James Scott. Gardenia, a wistful rag, starts in sunny major and ends in a passionate minor key.
Tabby Cat Walk, from the same set of "Three Popular Rags" as Seabiscuits, slyly ends with a series of measured silences. California Porcupine-originally titled "All Right, Albright" as an answer for one of his more outrageous and challenging rags-was renamed in the Siskiyou Mountains after sighting a representative of the large local population. Brazil's great Joplin counterpart Ernesto Nazareth was as yet unknown to me when I wrote Rag-Tango (a case of reverse influence perhaps?); my later use of its main theme in my cello sonata within a Nazareth-influenced movement happened after I had come to know that master.
I really intended my Last Rag to be just that; I truly had begun to wonder when I'd outgrow four flats and 2/4 time and cadences where you might expect them (or, in the case of my late lamented friend Bill Albright, where you wouldn't expect them), and it was beginning to worry me. For whatever reason, there are 22 of them (that I now acknowledge-I'm not sure what I think of the very few others I didn't count), so that it is clear that I couldn't stop writing rags. At least just yet.
In the second CD, Knight Hubert actually recalls Eubie Blake's own style less than that of his friend Charles Luckeyeth Roberts ("Luckey"), a great New York society stride pianist whose big song hit was "Moonlight Cocktail." Glad Rag, actually my very first rag, was inspired by Treemonisha and actually recalls that opera in a transitional passage; Epitaph for Louis Chauvin is my second, in a set I called "Three Classical Rags," and evokes the Gallic spirit of Chauvin's only published rag "Heliotrope Bouquet." Incineratorag, the third of that set, is probably closest of the three to standard rag form. Seabiscuits is found on my first rag album (which was named after the extant Chauvin rag) and feels to me like a circa-1912 big-city novelty rag; Fields of Flowers was written for my old friend Tom Constanten, another rag composer (and only surviving keyboardist of the Grateful Dead).
The four rags that make up the suite The Garden of Eden tell the story of the Fall in ragtime. Old Adam, a "Chicken Scratch" recalling the animal dances of the 1900's, contains a then-unconscious reminiscence of Chris Smith's 'teens hit "Ballin' the Jack." The Eternal Feminine has a harmonically devious third strain that calls up the Mystery of Woman. Eubie particularly liked the rag fantasia The
Serpent's Kiss; the final rag in the set, Through Eden's Gates, conjures the image of Adam and Eve calmly cakewalking their way out of Paradise. A very personal rag, Lost Lady is a lament for a failed marriage; Epithalamium, the youngest rag on the album, is on the other hand a celebration of a successful one, that of Diane Skomars and our old and close friend Max Morath.
John Murphy met William Bolcom in the mid-1970's at the beginning of doctoral study, and the composer was to become a member of a dissertation committee that included the pianist Gyorgy Sandor and the theorist Wallace Berry. But not till 1989 did John Murphy give a public performance of a Bolcom "rag." Though the time frame might seem strange, the location is all the more-Rustavelli Hall, in Tbilisi, Georgia, of the former Soviet Union (the composer was not present). That warmly received performance included the "Ghost Rags" and was probably the Asian premiere of those pieces-certainly of "Poltergeist" and "Dream Shadows." Since then, Bolcom rags have become a staple on John Murphy recitals throughout the United States, along with repertoire holdings from Scarlatti to John Anthony Lennon, and special investments in Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.
Raised in North Dakota, son of a Dublin-born Irish tenor and a first-generation Norwegian wife, he was on stage regularly at the age of five, traveling throughout the Dakotas, Saskatchewan and Alberta, performing in a lead role as a boy soprano in an operetta entitled "Prairie Portrait." Early musical training also included three years of violin (with Arturo Petrucci, who as a young boy studied with Joachim) and four years blowing the trombone in a marching band. Serious pianistic effort began in early high school. Parental insistence on continuing musical activity and the enthusiasm and enlightenment of a private teacher, Gerrit G. Vander Mei, gave birth to a career. John Murphy's keyboard talent was honed during a ten-year period under the tutelage of Ruth Slenczynska, Bela Siki, and Gyorgy Sandor, earning degrees at Southern Illinois University, University of Washington, and finally the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Michigan.
His professional debut, an award of the St. Louis Artist Presentation Society in 1969, elicited a comment from Richard Snyder of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch praising his "outstanding ability to handle lyric lines"-a sentiment echoed by many critics. John Murphy was hand-picked by the University of Michigan to perform the Schoenberg Piano Concerto at the Kennedy Center on the occasion of the Schoenberg-Ives centennial celebration. Reviewers for the Washington Star-News and Washington Post described this usually inaccessible work accordingly: "The Schoenberg Concerto, rarely performed, turned out to be rather engaging, neatly played by soloist John Murphy and the orchestraa brilliant solo performanceThe Schoenberg Concerto, I am happy to report, is beginning to sound charmingly old fashioned." Edward Rothstein attended Mr. Murphy's Carnegie Recital Hall debut and wrote in the New York Times, "The pianist had a wide palette at his dexterous fingertips and applied it with acuity and clarity, attending to the music's voicing and differing styles." John Murphy has been seen and heard in virtually every city, town and hamlet in the world, the result of being the "hand-double" for Universal Studios 1993 movie, "Hard Target," when he recorded part of the "Appassionata Sonata," of Beethoven. Mr. Murphy has been soloist with the Minneapolis Symphony and the New Orleans Philharmonic, as well as with a number of college and community orchestras.
John Murphy is now Professor of Piano at Loyola University of the South; he is a frequent recitalist and teaches in a studio that is now nationally competitive. He resides in New Orleans with his wife and two daughters.
Recording Engineer: Doug Ferguson
Piano Technician: Matthew C. McWilliams
Recorded at the University of New Orleans Performing Arts Center, September/October, 1998 on a Steinway D Piano.
Eubie's Luckey Day (Rag Obsession) (1969) (4:48)
Graceful Ghost Rag (1970) (4:05)
The Poltergeist (Rag Fantasy) (1970) (3:54)
Dream Shadows (1970) (5:36)
Raggin' Rudi (1974) (3:23)
The Gardenia (Slow Drag) (1970) (5:37)
Tabby Cat Walk (Slow Two-step) (1968) (5:22)
California Porcupine Rag (1968) (3:53)
Rag-Tango (1971 rev. 1988) (7:51)
Knight Hubert (1971) (3:45)
Epitaph for Louis Chauvin (Slow Drag) (1967) (5:45)
Incineratorag (1967) (3:15)
Seabiscuits (from three popular rags) (1967) (3:43)
Fields of Flowers (1977) (3:45)
Old Adam (Two Step) (1969) (2:30)
The Eternal Feminine (Slow Drag) (1969) (4:38)
The Serpent's Kiss (Rag Fantasy) (1969) (5:15)
Through Eden's Gates (Cakewalk) (1969) (4:27)
Lost Lady Rag (1969) (5:52)
Epithalamium (1993) (3:54)
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