William Bolcom is one of the most versatile contemporary American composers, writing chamber music, piano works, song cycles, concertos, music theatre, opera, and symphonies, displaying a mastery of many different compositional styles. Although not given to radical experimentation, he consciously avoids blindly following European styles, whether old or contemporary. He describes Charles Ives as his greatest influence, and in his operas and stage works he chooses to set pieces about American characters by American authors, and includes idioms such as ragtime and jazz in his works. In addition to this wide stylistic diversity, his works often display a trenchant sense of humor, on display in works such as the song Lime Jello Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise. He is also a noted performer, and in 1973 his recording of the complete piano music of Gershwin was named Stereo Review's Record of the Year. He and his wife mezzo-soprano Joan Morris have made over 20 recordings of American popular song. Bolcom began studying composition with John Verrall at the age of 11. After receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of Washington, he studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College. In 1960, Milhaud took Bolcom to Paris, where he also worked with Olivier Messiaen. In 1961 Bolcom went on to study with Leland Smith at Stanford. After earning his doctorate in composition there in 1964, he won the Marc Blitzstein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Dynamite Tonite, a piece that shows the influence of Milhaud and the Parisian cabarets. (His Casino Paradise, written in 1990, while still cabaret-style, shows more of an individual voice.) He returned to the Paris Conservatoire in 1964, and graduated in 1965, winning the second prize in that year's composition competition, as well as the first of two Guggenheim Fellowships. Bolcom won two Koussevitzky Foundation Awards, in 1976 and 1993, for the First Piano Quartet, and the Lyric Concerto for flute and orchestra, respectively. He has been commissioned by many of America's greatest musical institutions, including the orchestras of Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle, New York, Baltimore, Boston, and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. His commissions include a number of works for some of the greatest singers of our time, including Placido Domingo, Marilyn Horne, and Catherine Malfitano. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize in music for his 12 New Etudes for Piano. His most ambitious composition, which occupied him for 25 years, is a complete setting of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, which received its premiere at the Stuttgart Opera in 1984. A recording of the work, featuring the orchestras and choruses of the University of Michigan conducted by Leonard Slatkin, won three Grammy Awards in 2006, for Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album. In 2007, Musical America named Bolcom composer of the year. Bolcom has composed three operas, commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, all of which he wrote with librettist and long-time collaborator, Arnold Weinstein. McTeague (1992), conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, starred Ben Heppner and Catherine Malfitano. Weinstein collaborated with playwright Arthur Miller on the libretto for A View from the Bridge (1999), which was subsequently presented by the Metropolitan Opera in 2002. His third opera, A Wedding, is based on the film of the same name by Robert Altman, who worked on the libretto with Weinstein. It received its premiere in Chicago in 2004. Since 1973, Bolcom has taught at the University of Michigan. He became a full professor there in 1983, and in 1994 he was named the Ross Lee Finney Distinguished University Professor of Music. Bolcom also holds honorary doctorates from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Albion College. Stefan Wolpe was a composer notable for providing a fresh perspective on atonality. Despite excursions into popular, folk and jazz idioms, Wolpe continued to compose in atonal styles throughout his career. His works are often characterized by cross-cutting and discontinuity between different musical gestures and textures, quite possibly an influence he gathered from Dadaism. Wolpe was an influential teacher in the United States, where his pupils included Morton Feldman, Ralph Shapey and Charles Wuorinen. Wolpe spent the early part of his life in Berlin, a stimulating artistic milieu in the 1920s and 1930s. He associated there with the Bauhaus, studied composition with the expressionist composer Schreker, and became a devotee of Busoni. He supported himself as a jazz pianist in cabaret and cinemas. Wolpe's early compositions use the 12-tone techniques of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. From the outset he favored irregular rhythms and contrapuntal textures, and his music is notable for avoiding the isolated points of sound (pointillism) which was common to Schoenberg and his followers. He was also influenced by jazz and popular dance music in such pieces as Tango (1927), and his socialist convictions led him to reflect on the function of music in society. At this time he believed that music should be socially useful; he wrote worker's songs and pieces that satirized society. He also simplified his dense, atonal writing, making it more accessible to people without musical training. When the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Wolpe fled from the country, traveling through Russia and Rumania before landing in Vienna in 1933-1934, and studied there with Webern. From Vienna he moved to Palestine, where he became interested in his Jewish musical heritage. He absorbed traits of the local music, which found their way into such works as Songs From the Hebrew (1938) for soprano and piano, and the ballet suite Man From Midian (1942). He also wrote songs and choruses for the Kibbutz movement, several of which have become folk songs in Israel. In 1938 Wolpe moved to New York, where his mature style crystallized. Important works from this period are Enactments (1950-53) for three pianos, Battle Piece (1947) for solo piano, and the notorious Symphony (1956). Wolpe's association with influential artists and musicians continued in America, where he had connections with New York jazz musicians and Abstract Expressionist painters. From 1952-1956 he taught at Black Mountain College with John Cage, David Tudor and Lou Harrison. In the 1950s and early 1960s he regularly lectured at the Darmstadt Summer School. He contracted Parkinson's Disease in 1964, which proved fatal.