I was introduced to Tim Bowlby’s music several years ago by Esther Lamneck, who, at that time, was my Program Director at NYU. She asked me to coach an ensemble on Mined Sets, Tim’s trio for flute, clarinet and piano, which had been composed for Esther in 2009. I found it incredibly challenging and rewarding. The students were amazing and gave an incredible and memorable performance of the piece. I know their sense of time rose to a higher level – and so did mine!
Esther Lamneck is a virtuoso clarinet and tarogato (Hungarian folk instrument) player, well known in new music circles for her work with electronic media and improvisation. Her advocacy for contemporary music while Program Director of Woodwind Studies at NYU was unmatched. Among the many things she developed and exposed students to, were numerous commissions of trios for flute, clarinet and piano. I had the pleasure of being introduced to and teaching many amazing works by living composers, and was given the freedom to discover plenty of others on my own as well. Esther and I have remained close since she retired from NYU at the end of 2020. She has become extremely supportive of Eight Strings & a Whistle, and approached Tim about composing a work for us. The result is Trio for 4 Instruments which will be premiered on November 22, at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City. Thank you, Esther!
I am very pleased to share this interview with Tim Bowlby with you. Trio for 4 Instruments is virtuosic, fun and humorous. Please enjoy reading about Tim’s process and thoughts on music, and come hear his work in November!
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SG: What inspired you to become a composer?
Timothy Bowlby: I’ve always been preoccupied with sound. Some of my earliest memories have to do with music. Watching my father, Burton Bowlby, conduct the local high school band (a group he founded) when I was in elementary school is an important memory. He was also an arranger and wrote some original music, and partially to honor his memory I took to writing what ideas occurred to me down. Seeing other music teachers of mine doing what I was fascinated with, particularly Mr. Gordon Porter and Prof. Robert McCarthy, in ways that I have tried to emulate, should also be mentioned here.
SG: Who are your composer heroes?
TB: I don’t really have heroes, per se. There are aspects of many composers’ works I’m “knocked dead by” and try to have in mind while writing. I admire how wonderful Stravinsky’s endings are. I love the joy of exploration I sense in Haydn’s string quartets. Those are two of many examples I could cite. I also admire Bach (the formal flexibility of the cantatas!), am floored by certain aspects of Frank Zappa, have derived tone rows from rap ostinati, and am fascinated by aspects of Monk and Ellington’s music, and how well they and their ideas work(ed) together.
SG: I read in your bio that you are a trained singer. How does your experience as a singer influence what and how you compose?
TB: I’m lucky to be able to say I’ve derived much payment for my living expenses from musical activity, and work singing in churches, university choruses, etc., has been a big part of that. Singing these days is a way for me to directly and immediately make sound myself, something “I just gotta do” on a regular basis. Being sensitive to creating interesting lines for every performer involved in a work of mine has resulted from my singing background. It also is a way to generate rhythms from texts (as Webern occasionally did) occasionally in purely instrumental scores.
SG: Can you please describe your process?
TB: I sketch a lot, and keep the scraps of paper for later. Some ideas may lie dormant for years/decades. “Write it down! Keep it somewhere safe!” is vital advice for/to all composers. It can take me a while to “settle” on the idea of a piece sometimes, but once I have I can start sketching ideas quickly and soon after I’m itching to begin the score. Various ways of elaborating on ideas, some I’ve used for years, help generate more ideas. Once I start a work, it’s very hard not to keep at it.
SG: In your bio, you describe your music as non tonal but you also mention your recent work, In a Plain Brown Blues, which you describe as “a very tonal work for 9-piece jazz combo.” The pieces of yours that I am familiar with are rhythmically very complex and in the case of the Trio for 4 Instruments, the composite effect is often quite fun and amusing. Listening to your Rondo Capriccioso for alto sax and piano, I hear a language that is distinctly yours, that also employs harmonic and rhythmic elements of jazz. I hear it a bit in your Ghosts in the Early Frost for flute, violin, vibraphone and double bass and I can hear it in the Trio for 4 Instruments as well. Can you please elaborate on your approach/concept of tonality or non tonality as well as your approach/concept of rhythm and meter?
TB: I’m glad you find amusing fun in the Trio. Humor — clean/clever humor — is important to me, and often as I compose I find that as my head solves a creative problem musically it also produces stuff like the following…
It’s Tuesday. The town drunk’s down on his luck,
And he thinks, “Music! That ju-u-ust” might earn me half a buck!”
So, on Wednesday, then, he swipes two tablespoons,
Taps out twenty Tina Turner tunes,
And plans the same for Thursday. Then cheap schnapps
And low-grade beer are set out as traps by the cops.
This happens a lot especially in the early morning hours as I sip my first cups of coffee for the day. I have to write that material down as it’s part of the process of working out pitches and rhythms.
Schoenberg once wrote that any language that organizes tones will naturally express a kind of tonality. I support that idea. Somehow I give the impression that I was concocting symmetrical tone rows at birth and am incapable of anything else. While I did indeed do research work on aspects of the outputs of the 2nd Viennese School during graduate school, I started back in my high school days by emulating what I knew and admired at the time, especially Barry Manilow and Chicago’s early albums. In my view, Barry Manilow’s skills at arranging and songwriting are among the best in music history. And there are passages in The Chicago Transit Authority, the band’s 1st album, that if not truly non tonal, certainly lean towards it. It is what I was hearing, and so I emulated it like a lot of youngsters did/do. Occasionally ideas for pieces in that vein occur to me even now and working on them can be a nice change of pace. In most ways though I would approach it the same as I would my so-labeled “atonal” works — which is a term that Schoenberg neither coined nor approved of, by the way. He called it oxymoronic in his Harmonielehre.
SG: Do you feel your musical language has changed over the years? Can you speak to that in greater detail?
TB: For one thing, a lot of “dissertation itis” got school-of-hard-knocked out of it after I left University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with my degrees. At the same time, though, it’s retained, I hope, as much of its “rigor,” as it were as it had before.
SG: Your program notes for the Trio for 4 Instruments say: ”Several “standard rep.” chamber music pieces were in the back of my mind as models as I worked on this trio, notably the Op. 131 string quartet of Ludwig van Beethoven and the Op 114 clarinet, cello and piano trio by Johannes Brahms. This piece is an extension of that repertoire, not a departure from it.” Can you expand a bit more on where your ideas came from and can you be more specific about the connection between these two works and your trio?
TB: There’s a very quiet section in the middle of the Beethoven that struck me as expressive, and the idea of having similar ones in pieces like the Trio often occurs to me as a good idea. The A minor trio of Brahms was on my turntable while I was working on my Trio for 4 Instruments. While there’s no direct link between the two, I’ve loved the Op. 114 since I first heard it years ago. I like to think of my work as a composer as being in the same general line of tradition as it.
SG: Your program notes also state: “…Trio for 4 Instruments is the first piece of mine in which “extended techniques” are used (partly in order to offset the limited ability of the flute/alto flute, viola, and violoncello ensemble to create large, sustained chords the way the piano or vibraphone can). They are also used to help create variation and assure continuity.” Please elaborate on why it was important for you to compose a work for 8SW that included sustained chords larger than the flute, viola and cello might be capable of? And for our readers less familiar with extended techniques, could you please elaborate on the specific ones you included and what you aimed for them to achieve or add to the sound palate of this piece?
Did you have a concept first that you decided to apply to a work for flute/alto flute, viola and cello? Or was it the other way around – that you started with the instrumentation and then developed the piece using this as your foundation?
TB: One of the nice things about a piano is its pedal’s ability to sustain chords “in the background” while other instruments present more foreground material. That technique/device is a good “color to have in your creative palette generally.” Early on in my work on the Trio it occurred to me that that particular trope wasn’t available in the case of this piece, and for some reason I then thought maybe extended techniques could be a kind of “creative alternative,” for lack of a better way to say it, for it. With that in mind, I gave “key clicks” to the flute and alto flute and unpitched tapping on various places of the viola and the cello. According to a number of string players I’ve worked with over the years, simultaneous trills and tremolos are also kind of in that category because they’re apparently rarely combined. I’ve always liked that effect, personally, and have used it in the Trio as well.
SG: Beyond this, what are you aiming for with this work?
TB: To produce a piece of music that, hopefully, is as rewarding and entertaining a challenge to play and listen to as it was to write.
SG: Do you have advice for aspiring composers?
TB: Yes, I do. 1.) Learn the basics early; 2.) learn to play the piano and at least one other instrument (especially one that uses one or more clefs). If you can carry a tune in a bucket, sing in a choir; 3.) Study scores and listen omnivorously. Also, write your ideas down on paper (use pencils and invest in good, high quality erasers). You’ll have access to ’em even when the power goes out. (Not that that ever happens…) And… keep ’em — who knows when they might come in handy?!??
SG: What is your view of music being composed in our lifetime?
TB: That’s a very broad topic, but I am fascinated and have been enlightened by much that I’ve heard. British “art music’ composers like Nigel Osborne, John Casken, and Harrison Birtwistle have some amazing scores. Having an idea of what dubstep, etc., is all about has helped me “bridge the gap” between me and several of my “music appreesh” students over the years.
SG: What do you think the role of the arts and new music is or should be in today’s world?
TB: Again very broad, but if the music and other arts of the day can continue to help, delight, challenge, reassure and disturb us out of our complacencies, those are noble causes.
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Timothy J. Bowlby was born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia in 1958. He holds degrees in music from Acadia University (Wolfville) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main composition teachers included Morgan Powell, Owen Stephens, William Brooks, Gordon Callon, and Paul Martin Zonn; he has also worked with Milton Babbitt. Tim composes in a number of styles and a wide variety of ensembles. Non tonal chamber music for voices and instruments is a particularly strong predilection. His recent output, in addition to his Trio for 4 Instruments includes a work for piano quartet, a set of songs on texts by Thomas Hardy and A E Houseman, and In a Plain Brown Blues, a very tonal work for 9-piece jazz combo.
He has been teaching composition and related topics in person and on-line since the 1980’s, and in that time worked for UIUC, Columbia College (Chicago), St. Xavier University, Lewis University, and is currently teaching at the College of Du Page. He also has given residencies at NYU and Valdosta State University.
Tim is a trained singer and experienced conductor, especially of church-based ensembles. As a scholar he is interested in the concepts of reuse and influence in composition focussing mainly on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His most recent paper deals with implied symmetry and bow form in Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, Op. 29; he is currently examining selected short piano scores of Sergei Prokofiev in the context of the history of Russian compositional/theoretical trends.
Tim is also an avid writer of jokes, puns, limericks and other doggerel forms. He enjoys reading non-fiction, and is interested in archery and other types of exercise.
Tim’s music is published by Noteworthy Sheetmusic, LLC, a publisher specializing in music for the flute and alto flute.
