Irene Herrmann Paul Bowles music collection

Until the publication of The Sheltering Sky in 1949, the American author Paul Bowles was probably better known for his musical career as a composer and critic than for his writing. Bowles has written of his interest in music as a child, but it was his introduction to the composer Aaron Copland in 1929 that marked the true beginning of his music career. Copland became his teacher and Bowles traveled extensively in Europe with him, meeting literary figures such as Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, Christopher Isherwood, and Gertrude Stein. It was Stein, in fact, who advised Bowles to visit Tangier, and he first traveled to Morocco, with Copland, in 1931.

Virgil Thomson also had a profound influence upon Bowles's music career. In 1936, Thomson helped Bowles obtain his first major theatrical commission, the score for the John Houseman/Orson Welles production of Horse Eats Hat (1936). Bowles worked on other plays under the auspices of Houseman's Group Theatre and went on to become one of the most successful composers of American theater music, writing scores for plays by William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams, and other dramatists. Bowles also wrote orchestration for ballets, notably Yankee Clipper and Pastorela for Lincoln Kirstein's American Ballet Caravan. Tennessee Williams and Bowles became close friends and Bowles wrote the music for some of Williams's greatest plays, including The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. Bowles also collaborated with Williams on a number of songs. In 1942, Virgil Thomson arranged for Bowles to be hired as the music critic for The New York Herald Tribune. Bowles held this position for nearly four years and wrote over four hundred articles and reviews for the Herald Tribune before he resigned in February 1946.

Another significant musical relationship for Bowles was his friendship with the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks. She lived in America from 1942 to 1959 and, in 1948, followed Bowles in the position of music critic for The New York Herald Tribune. Glanville-Hicks composed three songs set to poems written by Bowles for her piece Ballade (1949). Another of her compositions, Letters from Morocco, used text from Bowles's letters to her, and was premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in a 1953 performance conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The 1999 supplement to the Paul Bowles papers includes a substantial group of letters from Glanville-Hicks which documents their close friendship.

Paul Bowles had a lifelong fascination with the indigenous music of other cultures, intensified by his travels in Latin America and North Africa, and later the Far East. Characterizing his work in theater, film, and ballet as "functional music," Bowles said that he found the "primitive" music of South American and African cultures satisfying to his philosophical and emotional interests in composition. In 1959, Bowles received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to record the indigenous music of Morocco for the Library of Congress. For the next two years, he spent much of his time traveling through Morocco recording music performed by native musicians in small towns and villages. His tapes were subsequently sent to the Library of Congress's Music Division and in 1972 a selection of the music Bowles recorded was issued in a two-volume LP record set.

By the late-1960s, Paul Bowles's energies were directed more towards his writing, and less frequently towards music. Interest in his music began to wane in the 1970s and his work as a composer was largely forgotten. During the 1980s however, there was a resurgence of interest in Bowles as a new generation of composers, musicians, and musicologists discovered his music. In 1984, Peter Garland published a collection of Bowles's Selected Songs, and a number of well-received recordings featuring Bowles's music have been released over the past two decades. His music has also been performed in concerts, including major concerts in Paris (1994) and New York (1995), both of which Bowles attended as the guest of honor. A festschrift, Paul Bowles's Music (Eos Music Inc., 1995), was published in conjunction with the New York concert. At the time of his death in November 1999, Paul Bowles had reclaimed his place as an American composer of significance.

Irene Herrmann was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned degrees in both German Literature and Music. She received her Masters Degree (1993) in Performance Practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with an emphasis on American vernacular music and 20th century piano repertoire. She has performed for many years with the New Music Works of Santa Cruz, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, and various ensembles at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also teaches courses in the Music Department. Herrmann worked extensively with Paul Bowles and serves as the executor of Bowles's musical estate.

An Evening of Works by Paul Bowles: a Masters Recital by Irene Herrmann. Santa Cruz, CA: UCSC Music Department, 1993. (cf. Paul Bowles Papers, Supplement 1999, series XV.)University of Delaware Library, Special Collections. Paul Bowles, 1910–1999: Catalog of an Exhibition August 22, 2000–December 15, 2000: Special Collections, Hugh M. Morris Library. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Library, 2000