The Pool K III
The Pool K III is Paul Bowles' most unfathomable musical work, one not yielding to easy interpretation. It is a realm of sound that creates a dreamlike journey without a clear point of origin or destination—a sojourn to be experienced in its entirety, without stopping.
With The Pool K III, Paul Bowles has created in eight separate tracks a work particularly unique to even his own wide-ranging catalog of compositions—a piece within the genre of musique concrete, a type of experimental music that gained recognition as a result of the soundscapes of Pierre Schaeffer and the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrete at the beginning of the 1950s. To a great extent, there was an aleatory element at play in their creations; musicians made numerous tape manipulations to alter sound, such as looping and splicing, at random and often included inadvertently-created sound and unconventional sources as part of their finished works. Widely-accepted conventions pertaining to music theory, rhythm and instrumentation were not considered essential elements to compositions. By contrast, improvisation was regarded as an essential part of the sound creation process.
Paul Bowles (American, 1910–1999) achieved distinction in more than one field of artistic endeavor, writing and music. As a writer he wrote an acclaimed body of short stories and the novel, The Sheltering Sky. Prior to his literary achievements Bowles had already earned acclaim in the 1930s and 40s as a composer of theatre and opera music, chamber music, art songs, film music, ensemble works and piano scores.
