William Bolcom was only 11 years old when he first set foot on the UW campus—as a student, that is. It was the beginning of a long association with the UW, one that culminated in his invitation back to campus last May as the Hans and Thelma Lehmann Distinguished Visiting Professor in Music.
The former child prodigy, who first came to the UW as a special student to study piano with Berthe Poncy Jacobsen and composition with John Verrall, is one of the pre-eminent composers to ever come out of Seattle.
Now 56 and a professor of music at the University of Michigan for the past 21 years, Bolcom, ’58, returned to the UW in May for a two-week residency with his wife, noted mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. She taught advanced UW vocal students, while he held a composers’ lab and heard his works performed by UW faculty and students in “William Bolcom: A Musical Homecoming.”
Indeed, it was a homecoming for Bolcom, a Seattle native who returned to the UW at the age of 17 to pursue a baccalaureate degree in music. He earned his degree in just three years, before going on to study with French composer Darius Milhaud at Mills College. He later studied aesthetics with Olivier Messaien at the Paris Conservatory, and, in the early 1960s, he went to Stanford to study with Leland Smith.
A self-described “omnivore” who devoured and learned from such diverse musicians as the Beatles, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, he discovered ragtime and engineered its revival in the 1970s with recordings of rags by Joplin, Lamb, Scott and even his own rags.
He writes for voice, from songs to grand opera (McTeague at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1992), as well as for instruments. His 12 New Etudes for piano won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
For a man who has known so much success, it didn’t always come easily. In fact, he credits his interest in the theater with “saving” him from spending his career writing cerebral and dissonant music.
“I got tired of my own music in the ’60s,” he says. “I wanted to write something I liked more myself,” he recalls.
That’s why he got involved in the ragtime movement in the 1970s. But his interests spread far and wide, and he expressed the influences of many musical movements and composers throughout his work. His style became rather unpredictable, as he “fused” different traditions, such as in his setting of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which premiered in 1984 at the Stuttgart Opera.
“We learn to make a link among different styles and forms,” he says. “We can say so much more and encompass a greater area of emotional and spiritual meaning when we open up our palettes.”