William Bolcom

William Elden Bolcom (born May 26, 1938) is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, three Grammy Awards, and the Detroit Music Award. Bolcom is a professor of music composition at the University of Michigan. He is married to mezzo-soprano Joan Morris.

Biography

Bolcom was born in Seattle, Washington. At the age of 11, he entered the University of Washington to study composition privately with George Frederick McKay and John Verrall and piano with Madame Berthe Poncy Jacobson. He later studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College while working on his Master of Arts degree, with Leland Smith at Stanford University while working on his D.M.A., and with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, where he received the 2éme Prix de Composition.

Bolcom won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988 for "12 New Etudes for Piano". In the fall of 1994, he was named the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan, a position which he still holds. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

His notable students include John Anthony Lennon, Frank Ticheli, Gabriella Lena Frank, and John Berners

Performance career

As a pianist, Bolcom has performed and recorded his own work frequently in collaboration with Joan Morris. Bolcom and Morris have recorded twenty albums together, beginning with "After the Ball," a collection of popular songs from around the turn of the 20th century. Their primary specialties in both concerts and recordings are showtunes and popular songs from the early 20th century, and cabaret songs (often from failed musicals).

Works

Bolcom's setting of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience", a three-hour work for soloists, choruses, and orchestra culminated 25 years of work on the piece. Its premiere at the Stuttgart Opera in 1984 was followed by performances in Ann Arbor, Chicago's Grant Park, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, St. Louis, Carnegie Hall, and London's Royal Festival Hall, the latter performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. In 2006, a recording of it won 3 Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album on Naxos Records.

His opera, "A View from the Bridge", with libretto by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein, was premiered October 9, 1999, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. He has also composed works for solo wind instruments such as "Concert Suite" for alto saxophone and band, composed for University of Michigan professor Donald Sinta in 1998.

Bolcom's other works include eight symphonies (he is planning a ninth), a number of piano rags (some written in collaboration with William Albright), and four volumes of cabaret songs which have recently been revived by Michelle and David Murray, another husband-and-wife performing duo. He composed his concerto " [http://www.bolcomandmorris.com/orch.html#009 Gaea for Two Pianos Left Hand, and Orchestra] " for Gary Graffman and his close friend Leon Fleisher, both of whom have suffered from debilitating problems with their right hands. It received its first performance in Baltimore in April 1996. The concerto is constructed so that it can be performed in one of three ways, with either piano part alone with reduced orchestra, or with both piano parts and the two reduced orchestras combined into a full orchestra. This challenging structure mimics that of a similar three-in-one work by his teacher Milhaud.

List of notable works

* 1977: "New Etudes for Piano"
* 1977-85: "Cabaret Songs" (Vol. 1 and 2)
* 1979-1984: "Gospel Preludes [http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/listings/2007/0715/] " (Books 1-4)
* 1984: "Songs of Innocence and of Experience (William Blake)"
* 1984: "Lilith" for Alto Saxophone and Piano
* 1984: Violin Concerto
* 1986: Fantasia Concertante, for viola, cello and orchestra
* 1989: Fifth Symphony
* 1990-92 "McTeague"
* 1993-96: "Cabaret Songs" (Vol. 3 and 4)
* 1996-97: Sixth Symphony
* 1997-98: "A View from the Bridge"
* 1998: "Concert Suite (for alto saxophone and band)"
* 2004: "A Wedding"
* 2008: Eighth Symphony

Illuminating Bolcom Festival

VocalEssence celebrated the music of William Bolcom with a two-week festival in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota in April 2007. Nine different performances and a number of master classes were part of the festival. The spotlight performance was of Bolcom's setting of William Blake's Songs "of Innocence and of Experience", performed in Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis with over 400 musicians performing under projections of Blake's accompanying artwork.

External links

* [http://www.bolcomandmorris.com/ William Bolcom and Joan Morris's website]
* [http://www.adventuresinmusic.biz/Archives/Interviews/bolcom.htm "The Unrepentant Eclectic" - An Interview with William Bolcom on AdventuresInMusic.biz, 2005 ("one of the best articles on me so far" - WB)]
* [http://www.2murraysmusic.com/ Information about Michelle and David Murray, performers of Bolcom's Cabaret Songs]
* [http://www.illuminatingbolcom.org Illuminating Bolcom Homepage]
* [http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june03/riches01.html Rags to Riches: Alumnus of the Year]
* [http://www.robincoxensemble.com/bio/index.html]