Arts Listings

Bolcom and Morris Return for SF Show

By Ken Bullock, Special to the Planet
Tuesday June 12, 2007

Composer-pianist William Bolcom and mezzo-soprano Joan Morris will make a rare Bay Area appearance 8 p.m. this Thursday (June 14) to present a “Red, White and Blue” Flag Day celebratory version of their popular recitals of American song of the past two centuries, at Piedmont Piano’s San Francisco store at 660 Third St. For information and reservations: (415) 543-9988 or www.piedmontpiano.com. 

Bolcom, who won the Pulitzer Prize and has set William Blake’s and Garcia Lorca’s poems to music, is also known for his operas, as Morris is famed as (per the title of her forthcoming memoir) “An Actress Who Sings.” But the two are probably best known for the decades of extensive research and performances of the results of their quest to discover how American popular songs have actually been sung—and what the tradition is, and chances are, for a distinctively American art song and cabaret. 

Along the way, in the course of meeting those elder statesmen of the music and theater who introduced new material, or gave old tunes their definitive form, Bolcom and Morris have also participated in new creations, and made interventions, including an involvement in the return of Ragtime composer Eubie Blake, who lived to 100, to the concert stage, where he held forth on a whole century of formative experience in “syncopated musics.” 

Last here in the winter and spring of 2005, in residence at UC Berkeley for their extraordinary recital presentations of the Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music series, Bolcom then recounted for The Planet the philosophy behind their search for “how American songs should be sung with authenticity, not as an example of Italian opera technique.” 

“At the foundation of every culture,” Bolcom inveighed, “is how words and music marry. It’s our patrimony. It’s ours—it’s what makes us.” And about their lifelong search: “I couldn’t talk to a troubadour, but I could talk to Irving Berlin ... about what’s not on the page.” 

Bolcom, who originally hails from Seattle, studied at Mills College with Darius Milhaud and won the Pulitzer in 1988 for his “12 Etudes for Piano.” Morris is originally from Portland, Oregon, and is known for her spirited versions of songs from the whole fabric of American musical theater and cabaret, to obscure historical numbers, as well as Bolcom’s tongue-in-cheek ode to ‘The Women Who Lunch,’ “Lime Jell-o Marshmellow Cottage Cheese Surprise,” best performed in ultra-Easter bonnet headgear.The couple now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.