The American composer William Bolcom has impeccable classical credentials, having studied with both Milhaud and Messiaen, but his musical sympathies extend across many of the conventional boundaries. Composer of numerous symphonies, concertos and stage works, he is a devoted exponent of ragtime piano and as accompanist to his wife, the cabaret singer Joan Morris, he has performed and recorded an encyclopaedic variety of American popular music. Black Host (1967) is a sonic spectacular for organ, percussion and electronic tape - big, brash, very American, and very late-Sixties. It is dedicated to Bolcom¹s close friend and collaborator, the late William Albright, who gave the first performance in the summer of 1968.

The title refers to a central heretical symbol of the Black Mass, but while the whole work clearly and powerfully evokes a ritual of some kind, this is of a deliberately ambiguous sort. Albright has written that ³it is not an exegesis on moral dualism, a dark ray of non-hope, or an uplifting sermon on the virtues of Calvinism² (as it has variously been called). Even the Black Host flagrantly juxtaposes several recognizable styles within its time-span and is unified by the ghost of an old hymn-tune from the Genevan Psalter. Neither is it programme music: It is an emotionally based piece, and if it is about anything it would be fear.

The score is inscribed with the rueful words of Lord Russell:
In the daily lives of most men and women, fear plays a greater part than hope: they are more filled with the thought of possessions that others may take from them, than of the joy that they might create in their own lives and in the lives with which they come in contact. It is not so that life should be lived. The drama falls in to three acts, beginning with an organ prelude. The curtain rises with a sequence of seven thunderous chords, separated by long silences. Mysterious scurryings and twitterings alternate with emotional outbursts of big organ sound and dissonant minor-key harmonies, and then an ominous drum-beat introduces a sinister passacaglia, which unfolds over a relentless ostinato on the organ pedals. Eventually, the drum is replaced by tubular bells and the music fades to nothing, leaving only the spacious echo of the bells. Suddenly the organ breaks into a surreal dance, and the final act begins. Taped sound-effects begin to creep in, and they initiate a crescendo into a monstrous collage of sound. It is finally swept away by the dramatic entrance of the Genevan psalm tune Donne Secours ­ Psalm 12; Help me, Lord, for there is not one godly man left. A serene coda, a pianissimo reprise of the seven curtain-raising chords, a big drum roll, a decisive concluding chord from the organ and the rite is over.