William Bolcom is an American composer and pianist born in Seattle in 1938, trained at the University of Washington, Mills College, Stanford University, and the Paris Conservatoire. He taught composition at the University of Michigan from 1973 to 2008 and has produced a wide-ranging output including four operas, nine symphonies, twelve string quartets, piano concertos, song cycles, cabaret songs, and piano rags, often performing his own cabaret and popular-song repertoire in duo recitals with his wife, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris.

Bolcom is noted for deliberately blurring the boundary between popular and art music, treating ragtime, cabaret song, and vernacular American idioms with the same craftsmanship as symphonic and chamber forms. His achievements have been recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1988, a Grammy Award, and the National Medal of Arts, and he is regarded as one of the leading American composers of his generation for his stylistic range and eclecticism.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolcom