Art & Creativity Quote by William Bolcom

"There's got to be something that you can do that will not just be a nice honor to the play, or the book, or the movie you're dealing with, but some aspect that maybe can explore something that the play couldn't do"

William Bolcom, Composer

About this Quote

Adaptation, in William Bolcom's framing, isn’t a dutiful bow to a revered source; it’s a raid on its blind spots. The line carries a quiet rebuke to the prestige economy that treats “faithfulness” as virtue and “respect” as the highest goal. Bolcom, a composer who’s spent a career moving between concert halls and vernacular styles, is arguing that reverence is a creative dead end. A “nice honor” is museum work: polished, careful, inert. What he wants is a transformation that justifies its own existence.

The subtext is practical and slightly combative: if you can’t name what your medium can uniquely reveal, you’re not adapting, you’re illustrating. Music can stretch time, intensify interiority, and make contradiction pleasurable; opera can externalize thought through voice; a film can use framing and montage to create meanings no stage direction can. Bolcom’s “maybe” is telling, too: he’s not prescribing a formula so much as describing the anxiety of adaptation done honestly. You have to gamble on an angle the original didn’t - or couldn’t - take.

Contextually, this sits in a late-20th-century arts landscape where adaptations proliferate and nostalgia is bankable. Bolcom’s insistence on “explore something the play couldn’t do” is a defense of artistic agency: the adapter isn’t a translator; they’re a co-author, obligated to find the new work’s reason for being.

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About the Author

William Bolcom (born May 26, 1938) is a Composer from USA.

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