William Bolcom is recognized as one of the America’s living composers. He is known for Twelve New Etude for piano which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. He not only composed lots of famous piano works, but also did bunch of voice, chamber ensembles, orchestra works. Besides he was as a professor of music at the University of Michigan, he has published variety of music, and appears regularly as a concert pianist and collaboration with his wife. Most of his works span the years 1963 to 1994, and comprise a wide range of compositional practices including serial technique, tonality, proportional rhythmic notation, special effects, Latin-American dance styles, blues…show more content… Although Bolcom’s goal is to erase boundaries between popular and serious music, he employs pointillism, minimalism, atonality, cluster, etc to illustrate his spiritual and philosophical themes. My goal in this paper is by focusing on his work Frescos to discover the methodology and his spiritual and philosophical themes in two-piano. I will relate them to other works which have the same…show more content… Like Samuel Barber, Bolcom just employ twelve-tone figures only to embellish tonal passages, and not as a compositional tool throughout the work. Atonal passages always accompany tonal works. For example, War in Heaven, there are polytonal sections based on the repetition of two triads. Diametrically opposing the tonal character of these sections are the interjections of dissonant melodic patterns. Frescos is not the only one work using tonal and atonal technique. It appears in the Sonata for Two
