Two Typed Letters Signed
Tangier, Morocco: 1980-81. Two typed letters signed, each on a single sheet of onionskin typing paper folded in original typed and stamped mailing envelopes.
Two typed letters signed by American writer and composer Paul Bowles, addressed to composer Christopher Berg, in original mailing envelopes. While Bowles is primarily celebrated for his work as a writer, he began his career as a composer under the tutelage of Aaron Copland, and was highly regarded for his compositions for the theater and his art songs, influenced by North African and Latin American rhythms. He continued to write music intermittently throughout his career. The younger American composer and pianist Christopher Berg, known for his vocal compositions and musical settings of American poetry, has been noted by several critics as having worked in the tradition of Bowles's compositional style, specifically his musical miniatures. Their works have been paired together in programming dedicated to 20th-century American art songs. In the letters, dated October 26, 1980, and May 4, 1981, and sent from Bowles's residence in Tangier, Morocco, where he lived as an expatriate for most of the second half of his life, to Berg in Brooklyn, Bowles dispels rumors that his wife Jane's play "In the Summer House" has been optioned for a musical, grants permission to Berg to set texts by his protegé Mohamed Mrabet to music for a choral work to be performed in Santa Fe, addresses Berg's desires to give up music, relates an anecdote about Copland, and speculates as to the whereabouts of his own original compositions: "A good deal of it is lost; at least, I have no idea of where it might be. The Newberry Library in Chicago has about thirty songs. Beyond [that], all is darkness as far as I'm concerned." Letter dated October 26, 1980 with a small handwritten note in blue ink by Bowles to the bottom margin. Letters fine, envelopes with minor rubbing and creasing. Item #13047
$500.00