Paul Bowles

by Lynn VoughtBowles studied with Copland, Thomson and Boulanger during the 1920s and early 30s, while living in Europe and North Africa. For the next three decades he wrote music for the New York theatre. In 1941 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to compose the opera The Wind Remains. He returned to Tangier in 1948 to write his second opera, Yerma, for blues singer Libby Holman. He conducted ethno-musicological research in Tangier under a Rockefeller grant during the 1960s. Most of his compositions were written before 1949. In that year his novel about travellers, The Sheltering Sky, was published. As a composer, Bowles wrote in short forms. Even his operas are constructions of suites of songs. They draw heavily upon American jazz, Moroccan rhythm and Mexican dance for inspiration. His fiction is generally dark in character and centers around insights of psychological perception.