Celebrating Bolcom: In Recognition of a Michigan Teaching Legacy

The University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance announces Celebrating Bolcom, an evening of William Bolcom’s music performed by current SOMTD students, former students, and colleagues, on the occasion of the distinguished American composer’s retirement from teaching.

Celebrating Bolcom occurs on Friday, March 28 at 8:00 p.m. at Rackham Auditorium. The concert is free and open to the public.

Some of the highlights of the concert are excerpts from Bolcom’s 4th violin sonata, operas, rags, and cabaret songs. Performers that night include faculty colleagues Yitzhak Schotten, Katherine Collier, Arthur Greene, Josh Major, Logan Skelton, Aaron Berofsky, Phillip Bush, and Stephen Shipps.  SOMTD students, including Musical Theatre majors, will also perform on the program.

William Bolcom’s immense talent and prodigious output has been recognized by a Pulitzer Prize, the 2006 National Medal of Arts and, in 2005, four Grammy Awards for his epochal setting of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, performed by the U-M University Symphony Orchestra and a host of choirs and soloists at Hill Auditorium and recorded in Ann Arbor in April 2004 for the Naxos label.

His numerous commissions across a wide array of musical forms have brought international acclaim. Earlier this month his Eighth Symphony was premiered by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in both Boston and New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Mr. Bolcom, a native of Seattle, began his formal music education at the University of Washington at the age of 11. He earned his bachelor’s at Washington, went on to Mills College to study with Darius Milhaud, whom he later joined at the Paris Conservatoire. He completed his doctorate at Stanford University.

He joined the faculty of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance in 1973 and was named the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Composition in 1994.  

University of Michigan alumni who have studied under Bolcom’s tutelage are legion. A short list includes Arthur Gottschalk, Gordon Beeferman, Derek Bermel, Frank P. Ticheli, Gabriela Frank, Daniel Worley, Kristen Kuster, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and Andrew Kirshner.

Bolcom has composed chamber, operatic, vocal, choral, cabaret, ragtime, and symphonic music. He has produced some 300 symphonic works, innumerable chamber pieces and songs, and three full-fledged operas. He and his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, have performed as the duo Bolcom & Morris in venues all across the country, in Canada, and abroad – the heart of their repertoire being cabaret songs, show tunes, and popular songs from the early 20th century.