Owsley Brown met the American expatriate writer Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky) at his home in Tangier, Morocco, two years before Bowles’s death. Brown’s award-winning Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles shines a light on Bowles’s lesser-known work as a composer for theater, opera, ballet, and film. Seven short pieces by Bowles are presented in their entirety, each accompanied by imagery that evokes the time period and/or locale—New York, Paris, Oaxaca, Tangier—where the music was composed. Praised for its sensitive handling of its subject, this intimate and insightful portrait connects Bowles with iconic figures such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and Orson Welles.
Join us at 6:30 p.m. for a live performance of music composed by Paul Bowles.
Music composed by the American expatriate polymath Paul Bowles will be performed by Irene Herrmann, pianist and curator of the Bowles music estate, with soprano Sheila Willey. Songs feature texts by Bowles’s friends William Saroyan, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams. Owsley Brown’s documentary Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles screens in the Barbro Osher Theater after the performance.