The University Record, November 19, 1996
William Bolcom will give Russel Lecture
William E. Bolcom, the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Music, has been chosen as the University’s 1997 Russel Lecturer.
The annual lectureship is the highest honor the University gives to senior faculty members. Bolcom was nominated for the honor by the Research Club and was confirmed by the Board of Regents at their Nov. 14–15 meeting. He will deliver the Russel Lecture on March 11.
When Bolcom was named to the Finney Professorship in 1994, he was described as “one of the most versatile and accomplished American composers active today. His musical talent and productivity have been and continue to be impressively large and wide-ranging. His pioneering brand of post-modernism, in which he draws from popular and classical traditions and synthesizes them into music uniquely his own, has now become mainstream.”
Bolcom, who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for music, has received many other honors. He won the Prix de Paris, three Rockefeller Foundation Awards, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships, two Koussevitzky Awards. He received Michigan Governor’s Arts Award in 1987 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1993.
Bolcom has been a U-M faculty member since 1973.
