Paul Bowles on Music.

edited by Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann University of California Press, 292pp. $34.95

Best known as an author (and an ex-pat in Morocco) since his 1949 debut novel, The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles also was a composer. His musical works generally attain the transparent texture--if not perhaps the quality--of those of his associates Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, and they've undergone a minor renaissance since his death, at eighty-eight in 1999. The time seems ripe for Paul Bowles on Music, a volume collecting Bowles's critical writings on music from the period before his central vocation jelled and his activity in this vein became (as Mangan nicely puts it) "a chapter in the life, but not the whole book." As of 1931, he contributed articles to Modern Music (of which Aaron Copland was the eminence grise), and from 1942 to 1946 he served on Thomson's extraordinary reviewing staff at The New York Herald Tribune.

A graceful stylist, Bowles covered world music (before the term was coined), sometimes using ethnic generalizations that would be unlikely today; he also wrote ...