Art & Creativity Quote by William Bolcom

Composition, in Bolcom's telling, isn't a clean act of engineering so much as a messy, half-conscious flirtation with inevitability. He starts by downplaying the myth of the omnipotent composer: "not necessarily always assigning" suggests he isn't placing motifs like furniture in a room. He's admitting to uncertainty, to drafts that don't yet know what they are. That humility matters coming from Bolcom, a figure who spent decades refusing the polite borders of "serious" music, writing symphonies and rags, cabaret songs and opera. His work often sounds like it has multiple dialects in the same sentence; the process he describes matches the aesthetic.

Then comes the pivot: "all of a sudden something would fall into place". The phrase is intentionally casual, almost suspiciously so, as if he doesn't trust the grand language of inspiration. But he's also describing a very real compositional phenomenon: the moment when material stops behaving like fragments and starts acting like destiny. "Exactly that" is the clincher. It's not "good enough" or "pretty close". It's the eerie click of rightness, when the ear recognizes a solution before the intellect can defend it.

Subtext: Bolcom is arguing for listening as the primary form of authorship. The composer isn't merely inventing; he's catching. In a culture that romanticizes either pure inspiration or pure technique, Bolcom splits the difference: you work without certainty until the piece tells you what it needed all along.