William Bolcom

National Medal of Arts, Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning composer William Elden Bolcom (born May 26, 1938) is an American composer of chamber, operatic, vocal, choral, cabaret, ragtime and symphonic music.

Bolcom was born in Seattle, Washington. At the age of 11, he entered the University of Washington to study composition with George Fredrick McKay and John Verall 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.

He joined the teaching staff of the University of Michigan in 1973. In the fall of 1994 he was named the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Composition at the University of Michigan. Bolcom won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1988 for 12 New Etudes for Piano, and four 2005 Grammy Awards for his setting of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience on the Naxos label.

As a pianist, Bolcom has performed and recorded his own work frequently in collaboration with his wife and musical partner Joan Morris. Their primary specialties in both concerts and recordings are cabaret songs, show tunes and popular songs from the early 20th century.

As a composer, Bolcom has written four violin sonatas; eight symphonies; three operas (McTeague, A View from the Bridge and A Wedding), plus several musical theater operas; eleven string quartets; two film scores (Hester Street and Illuminata); incidental music for stage plays, including Arthur Miller's Broken Glass; fanfares and occasional pieces; and a tremendous variety of chamber and vocal works.

Bolcom's setting of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, a full evening's 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.

The April 8, 2004 performance of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Ann Arbor, Michigan commemorated the reopening of recently-renovated Hill Auditorium and occurred, almost to the day, 20 years after the U.S. premiere in the same hall. The performance utilized the University of Michigan School of Music orchestra, massed choirs and professional soloists. The Naxos recording won three 2005 Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album under the Naxos label and its producer was named Producer of the Year, Classical.

In Spring 2007, Songs of Innocence and of Experience will be staged in Minneapolis by VocalEssence and a number of artistic partners as the highlight of Illuminating Bolcom, a two-week festival of the composer's creative genius.