Composer/pianist WILLIAM BOLCOM was born in Seattle, Washington, in 1938. Exhibiting musical talent while still very young, he began (at age 11) private composition studies with John Verrall and piano lessons with Berthe Poncy Jacobson at the University of Washington. He continued to perform extensively in the Seattle area and throughout the Northwest.
Bolcom earned his B.A. from the University of Washington in 1958, studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in California and at the Paris Conservatoire de Musique, and earned a doctorate in composition in 1964 from Stanford University, where he worked with Leland Smith. Returning to the Paris Conservatoire, he won the 2e Prix in Composition in 1965. While in Europe he began writing stage scores for theaters in West Germany, continuing at Stanford University, in Memphis, Tennessee, at Lincoln Center/New York, and the Yale Repertory Theater. He returned to America to hold various university teaching positions and to develop his own interpretation of ragtime. He joined the teaching staff of the University of Michigan in 1973. After earlier use of serialism, he developed his own particular musical idiom, influenced in good part by his interest in and performance of popular music-hall and parlour songs. His work is summarised in his monumental setting of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, written between 1956 and 1981.
Various awards throughout his career include:
a BMI award (1953) • two Guggenheim fellowships (1965 and 1968) • several Rockefeller Foundation awards • several NEA grants • the Marc Blitzstein Award (1966) from the Academy of Arts and Letters (for Dynamite Tonite, an opera for actors written with his long-time collaborator, Arnold Weinstein) • two Koussevitzky Foundation Awards (1976 and 1993) for the First Piano Quartet and the Lyric Concerto for Flute and Orchestra - written for James Galway • the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988 for 12 New Etudes for Piano • the 1977 Henry Russel Award (the highest academic prize given by the University of Michigan) followed 20 years later by the prestigious Henry Russel Lectureship (awarded to a senior faculty member) in March 1997 at the U of M • the Michigan Council for the Arts Award • the Governor’s Arts Award from the State of Michigan • the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988 for 12 New Etudes for Piano
investiture in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 • honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Albion College, and the New England Conservatory, and the New School University/New York • the Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award from the University of Washington in 2003 • Songs of Innocence and of Experience won Best Classical Album, Best Contemporary Composition and Best Choral Performance at the 2005 GRAMMY Awards • Information taken from: http://www.bolcomandmorris.com/bolcom.html
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