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At his high school in Flushing, Bowles served as the Poetry Editor for The Oracle and establishes contacts with the Paris avant-garde magazine transition which publishes 12 of Bowles's poems. (Bowles's poems are collected in Next to Nothing {Black Sparrow Press, 1981}.) In 1928, Bowles enrolled in the University of Virginia but soon ran away to Paris where he worked as a switchboard operator for the International Herald Tribune. After returning to New York in 1930, he struck up a close companionship with Aaron Copland who became his musical mentor. From 1931 to 1933, Bowles and Copland traveled through Europe together, meeting Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein, who dismissed Bowles's early surrealistic poetry and advised them to travel to Tangier in 1931. Upon their return to New York in 1933, Bowles established himself as an important young composer, composing an orchestral suite, a cantata, and a great deal of incidental music for a variety of Broadway stage productions. In 1936, the WPA's Federal Music Project sponsored an all-Bowles concert at New York's Town Hall. He befriended Henry Brant, David Diamond and John Cage, and became a protégé of jazz record archivist John Hammond and Virgil Thomson who later hires him to write music reviews for the New York Herald Tribune, where he becomes the first music journalist to cover jazz and world music. In 1938, he wedded playwright and novelist Jane Auer with whom he remained in a committed yet open marriage (both were bisexual) until her death in 1973.
For the next decade, Paul and Jane Bowles divide their time between New York City and extensive travel in the United States, Europe and Latin America. Highlights of his extensive theatre work during this time include incidental music for Orson Welles and John Houseman's Too Much Johnson (1938) (the music of which was later recycled by Bowles as Music for a Farce), William Saroyan's My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), and Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie (1944). Bowles's becomes a cause celebré in New York musical circles with performances of the Mexican Indian ballet Pastorela (1941) featuring choreography by Lincoln Kirstein, his one act zarzuela The Wind Remains (1943) based on a text by Federico Garcia Lorca, which was conducted by Leonard Bernstein and featured choreography by Merce Cunningham, the song-cycle Blue Mountain Ballads (1946) featuring texts by Tennessee Williams, and the Concerto for Two Pianos, Winds and Percussion (1946) arguably his musical masterpiece, commissioned by duo pianists Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale and premiered by them with an ensemble conducted by Lukas Foss. Although he began writing short stories at this time, many of which appear in his Collected Stories 1939-1976 {Black Sparrow Press}, his literary efforts received little attention. In fact, a 1947 American Music Center biography of Bowles does not even mention his literary endeavors.
In 1947, Bowles arrives in Tangier, simultaneous working on a full orchestra version of the Concerto for Two Pianos and his first novel, The Sheltering Sky. Bowles completed the orchestration in 1949, the same year that The Sheltering Sky was published. The novel, which recounts the misadventures of three Americans in the Sahara, catapulted Bowles to literary stardom and still appears on many lists of the greatest books of the 20th century. The overwhelming success of this book, which was made into a major motion picture Bowles loathed directed by Bernardo Bertolucci starring John Malkovich and Debra Winger in 1990, has unfortunately obscured his importance as a composer as well as his subsequent novels: Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), and Up Above The World (1966). Contrary to popular belief, Bowles did not stop composing after the publication of The Sheltering Sky, and in fact, created some of his most important musical works including the remarkable Picnic Cantata (1954), featuring a libretto by the poet James Schuyler, and the opera Yerma (1948-58), based on a play by Lorca, which premiered at Denver University in 1958. Between 1966 and 1993, Bowles composed incidental music for six theatrical productions by Joseph A. McPhillips III at the American Academy of Tangier.
Bowles's impact as a composer and author extends far beyond his own work. The seamless blending of words and music in his vocal works foreshadows the subsequent work of composers ranging from Ned Rorem to Stephen Sondheim. His instrumental sonorities, which meld sumptuous melodies with throbbing ostinatos, foreshow the eclecticism of the new generation of post-minimalist composers. A significant translator, he is responsible for the English translation title of Jean-Paul Sartre's most famous play No Exit, which, legend has it, came to him as he was departing the New York City Subway System. A pioneer in the dissemination of oral literature, Bowles recorded, transcribed and translated orally-transmitted short stories and novels composed by several Moroccan authors, most notably Mohammed Mrabet. In the 1950s, Bowles also conducted extensive field recordings of traditional music throughout Morocco, portions of which were compiled on a 2-LP set issued by the United States Library of Congress. Dubbed America's only true existentialist, Bowles in his later years became a mentor to the Beat Writers inspiring pilgrimages to Tangier by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and many others.
In 1995, Bowles returned to New York for an extensive three-day festival of his music coordinated by the Eos Ensemble (now the Eos Orchestra) under the direction of Jonathan Sheffer. Eos has also published a monograph on Bowles's music, released in conjunction with the Festival. In the past five years, there have been several important all-Bowles recordings released on CD, the most notable being the Eos Ensemble's Music of Paul Bowles {BMG/Catalyst 68409} and the HCD Ensemble's Paul Bowles: Migrations {Largo 5131}.
There have been three documentary films about Paul Bowles: Gary Conklin's Paul Bowles in Morocco (1986, available on home video from Mystic Fire), Jennifer Baichwal's Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles (1998), and Owsley Brown's Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles (1999), winner of the Hamptons International Film Festival 1999 Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Paul Bowles also wrote an autobiography Without Stopping (1972), although William S. Burroughs dubbed this self-told account by this legendary elusive man Without Telling.
Some other Bowles sites worth visiting:
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/People/PaulBowles.html
http://www.mg.co.za/mg/books/jan98/19feb-bowles.html
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