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.

4-c-per Performance. Deciding that he "had to make it on his own," he quit his job, divorced his first wife, and set out to get his music heard any way he could. In time, he says candidly, he became "the father of contemporary music in commercials," writing the same kind of music for toothpaste and spaghetti (Ipana, Buitoni, Noxzema) that he did for the concert hall. Commissions for documentaries and TV shows started to roll in, and in one year he made $30,000. That enabled him to devote more time to symphonic music --and the race track. In 1958, with a $1,000 killing he made at Aqueduct, he recorded his Concert Ballet and badgered conductors to lend an ear. One did, and it resulted in the premiere of Short Symphony with the Washington National Symphony. That led to further performances of other compositions; 14 have been played so far this season.

Although performances of his major compositions give him a big thrill, Bazelon does not deride the itty-bitty things he writes for the commercial trade. Take the four-note rhapsody that he turned out for NBCTV: it's not Beethoven, but the network plays it as the theme for every special news program, and Bazelon gets 40 in royalties each time it is played.

Now 43, "Big Bud," as his second wife Cecile calls him, is plotting new adventures. "Overwhelmed" by the experience of seeing his first Kentucky Derby, he exclaimed last week: "Stravinsky wrote the Dumbarton Oaks Concerto. I would like to write the Churchill Downs Concerto."

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