William Bolcom, 2009-2010 Featured Composer
The New Century Chamber Orchestra welcomes William Bolcom as the 2009-2010 Featured Composer. New Century presents the world-premiere of Mr. Bolcom's new violin concerto, Romanza,May 2010.
Composer/pianist William Bolcom, recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Music, has received commissions from the Vienna Philharmonic (Salzburg Mozarteum), Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Saarlandischer Rundfunk, American Composers Orchestra, Saint Louis, National, Pacific, and Boston Symphonies, the MET Orchestra, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Mendelssohn Quartet, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinists Sergiu Luca and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, soprano Benita Valente, the Van Cliburn Foundation, and many other performing arts organizations, ensembles, and artists.
As a piano soloist, accompanist for his wife (mezzo-soprano Joan Morris), and composer, Mr. Bolcom is represented on recordings by over 20 different labels. The Naxos recording of his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, a musical illumination of 46 poems by William Blake, performed by University of Michigan orchestras and choruses with internationally-known soloists, under the baton of Maestro Leonard Slatkin, won four Grammys in February 2006, including Best Classical Album and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. Another Naxos album of his music, William Bolcom Songs with soprano Carole Farley and the composer at the piano, received two Grammy nominations; two others, Bolcom’s Fourth Symphony, recorded by Maestro Slatkin with the Saint Louis Symphony, and After the Ball, with Bolcom and Morris, have also received Grammy nominations. Over a period of 45 years poet/librettist Arnold Weinstein collaborated with Bolcom on his operas, cabaret songs, and choral works; he died September 2005.
Recipient of fellowships and grants from numerous major foundations, Mr. Bolcom was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993, and holds honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory, Albion College, New England Conservatory, New School University in New York, and Baldwin Wallace College. As a writer, he has been published in numerous music magazines, collaborated with Robert Kimball on a book about Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake (recently reissued), and in articles in the New Grove Dictionary of Music. His edition of essays by composer George Rochberg, The Aesthetics of Survival, published by the University of Michigan Press, was reissued in a revised edition in 2004.
Born in Seattle, Washington in 1938, William Bolcom entered the University of Washington to study composition privately with John Verrall at the age of eleven. Later he studied extensively with Darius Milhaud in California and in Paris. He received a master’s degree from Mills College and was the first conferee of a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Stanford University. Bolcom taught at the University of Washington, Queens and Brooklyn Colleges of the City University of New York, and New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1973. He retired in 2008 and continues to reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
For more information about William Bolcom, please visit his website at www.williambolcom.com.