William Bolcom
William Elden Bolcom ( born May 26, 1938 in Seattle, Washington) is an American composer and pianist.
Life and work
Bolcom came with 11 years at the University of Washington and studied composition with George Fredrick McKay and John generalization and piano with Berthe Poncy Jacobson there. This was followed by studies with Darius Milhaud at Mills College, with Leland Smith at Stanford University and with Olivier Messiaen at the Conservatoire de Paris, where he received a second composition prize.
In 1953 he won the BMI Student Composer Awards. 1988 Bolcom received the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 12 New Etudes for Piano. In the fall of 1994, he was appointed " Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Composition" at the University of Michigan; he keeps this position until today.
Bolcom worked 25 years of his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience by William Blake, a full-length work for soloists, chorus and orchestra. At the premiere in 1984 at the Stuttgart Opera, followed by performances in Ann Arbor, in Grant Park in Chicago, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in St. Louis, Carnegie Hall and the Royal Festival Hall in London, the latter played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. 2006 was the inclusion of this work in the Naxos label 3 Grammy Awards (Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition and best publication in the field of classical music).
On 15 September 2006 his Canciones de Lorca for Tenor and Orchestra from the Pacific Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carl St. Clair and the soloists Placido Domingo premiered at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, California.
Also active as a pianist, Bolcom has performed and recorded, often together with his wife, the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris own works. Bolcom and Morris took 20 plate albums together, beginning with After the Ball, a collection of popular songs of the late 19th and early 20th century. Your specific preferences, both in concert and in recordings are striking and popular songs from the early 20th century, as well as cabaret songs (often from musicals that were a flop otherwise ).
In the catalog raisonné Bolcom's operas to find (including A View from the Bridge on a libretto by Arthur Miller and Arnold Weinstein, premiered in 1999 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, most recently: A Wedding of 2004), 6 symphonies and chamber music. Bolcom also wrote numerous ragtime, some together with the composer William Albright and many, composed for his wife, cabaret songs (including the most widely known Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise ).