Composers: The Ballad of Big Bud

Some composers drink. Others dabble in love affairs. Irwin ("Bud") Bazelon goes to the race track. There, he says, "things crystallize for me. All aspects of life—hope, anxiety, success, joy, failure, anticipation—are capsulized in a two-minute ride. It stimulates me."

It also stimulates his bank account. Last week, for example, Bazelon went to the bluegrass country to oversee the recording of his Short Symphony by the Louisville Orchestra. He took advantage of the happy coincidence by flying in a few days early to take in the Kentucky Derby, bet $200 on Kauai King, the eventual winner, and walked off with combined winnings for the day of a stimulating $500.

Violent, Silent World. For Bazelon, handicapping is more than just a lucrative hobby. "The track," he explains, "is an extension of the pulse and rhythmic beat of the city, and these are the roots of my music." Indeed, the rumble of hooves has been known to inspire him to a dash off a few themes while hanging on the rail. In his Dramatic Movement for Orchestra, for instance, the slam-bang finale is his version of the horses thundering down the stretch at Aqueduct.

Thundering, in fact, is his forte. He has little use for the twelve-tone school, prefers instead a scattergun attack of drums, gongs, cowbells, wood blocks, maracas, xylophones, glockenspiels and tubas. All are brought into play in Short Symphony, a 14-minute piece subtitled "Testimony to a Big City." It bristles with jazzy splashes, but too often falls off the pace like a mudder on a fast track. It is restless, aggressive, often directionless music, a personal statement of what Bazelon calls his "violent, silent world inside." Just how he arrived at his present state of agitation is a case study of the tribulations faced by most young composers nowadays.

Erupting World. Bazelon says that he is called Bud because "Irwin just isn't me." He used to be an Irwin, though. That was back in the days when he was studying composition at De Paul University in Chicago. Partly because of a punctured eardrum that left him semideaf, he was "shy, diffident, introverted—an exceptionally quiet guy." Six months of study with Composer Paul Hindemith at Yale didn't help matters much; he lost 25 Ibs. and suffered a nervous breakdown. "I couldn't take his Prussian taskmaster tactics," says Bazelon. Bazelon eventually 'fled to California to study at Mills College with Composer Darius Milhaud, and in 1948 decided to strike out on his own. For the next seven years he worked in Manhattan as a railroad reservations clerk and wrote music on the side.

Then Bazelon met a psychiatrist who not only "revealed to me my true personality," but steered him to an ear doctor who restored his hearing with an operation. Suddenly, he recalls, "the violent, silent world inside me erupted. I came out of my shell." And how. Exclaims Bazelon: "I became outgoing, warm, animated, tremendously buoyant —a rock 'em, sock 'em personality. And my music became just as dramatic as I am." exit Irwin; enter Bud.