Biography
Paul Bowles emerged in the twentieth century as an American composer, writer, and ethnomusicologist whose field recordings captured the Indigenous music and spoken traditions of Morocco. Born into a prosperous New York household in 1910, the boy displayed exceptional early aptitude, mastering reading by age three and producing his initial poems and stories once he reached four. Jazz captured his attention during adolescence, yet his father’s rigid household rules barred the music from being played at home. A performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird at fifteen ignited his desire to compose and improvise. His literary efforts also advanced when the poem “Spire Song” appeared in the journal Transition during 1927. Although he enrolled at the University of Virginia the following year, Bowles abruptly departed for Paris in 1929, intent on becoming a writer and leaving both his parents and the university uninformed. The venture faltered, prompting his return to complete his studies. During the same period he met Aaron Copland in New York; Copland later remarked that Bowles proved an unreceptive pupil. The two entered a romantic relationship and journeyed together to Paris and Morocco in 1931. Their liaison evolved into friendship the next year, while Bowles persisted in his compositional pursuits. In Paris he formed a connection with Gertrude Stein and pursued further instruction from Nadia Boulanger, Roger Sessions, and Virgil Thomson. Once his earliest keyboard and chamber pieces were finished, his standing as a composer rose swiftly. By 1936 he had begun supplying incidental music for figures such as Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams, along with several ballets and orchestral scores. He wed author Jane Auer in 1938; after a shared journey to Mexico the couple established residence in New York. A Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition was awarded to him in 1941, and Virgil Thomson engaged him the following year to serve as a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. By the late 1940s Bowles had grown disenchanted with composing and recognized that language offered a more effective medium for expression. He relocated to Tangier around 1947, and his wife followed in 1948. The Sheltering Sky, his debut novel, was completed in 1949, and its favorable reception confirmed his direction as an author. A Rockefeller grant in 1959 supported his ethnomusicological fieldwork in Morocco, after which he commenced collecting and translating oral narratives from local inhabitants beginning in 1960. Throughout the 1980s he conducted writing workshops in Morocco as an educator. Although he produced little music in his final decades, he continued writing into the mid-1990s. Bowles succumbed to heart failure in Tangier in 1999.
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