The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Elliott Cook Carter Jr. was an American modernist composer. One of the most respected composers of the second half of the 20th century, he combined elements of European modernism and American "ultra-modernism" into a distinctive style with a personal harmonic and rhythmic language, after an early neoclassical phase. His compositions are known and performed throughout the world, and include orchestral, chamber music, solo instrumental, and vocal works. Carter was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.
Morton Gould was an American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist.
Karel Husa was a Czech-born classical composer and conductor, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Music and 1993 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In 1954, he immigrated to the United States and became an American citizen in 1959.
William Quincy Porter was an American composer and teacher of classical music.
Leslie Raymond Bassett was an American composer of classical music. Bassett received the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Bassett had a lifelong relationship with the University of Michigan School of Music. He received the MM there, and in 1956 was the recipient of the University's first DMA. Bassett was a member of the University of Michigan faculty from 1952 until 1992. Upon retirement from active teaching in 1992, he held the title of Albert A. Stanley Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Composition until his death in 2016.
Donald James Martino was a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer.
Jefferson Friedman is an American composer. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Christos Hatzis is a Juno Award-winning Greek-Canadian composer. Many of his compositions are performed internationally, and he is a professor at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto.
String Quartet No. 2, Musica Instrumentalis (1997) is a string quartet by Aaron Jay Kernis, inspired by renaissance and baroque dances, composed for the Lark Quartet and awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, with a special citation to George Gershwin. His first quartet being named Musica celestis:
My new string quartet started off because I wanted to deal with baroque dance forms and medieval dance rhythms. There wasn't an image—it developed from purely musical ideas. This was a case where the piece turned out to be formally very different from what I first expected. I thought it would be five movements, but I started cannibalizing one movement into another and wound up with three. The first movement is like a dance medley, with a first big A section and a closing A section that is a development of the opening medley. Stuck in the middle of these two A's is a minuet and trio that originally was an entirely separate movement. While working on the first movement, I decided that the relaxation that I needed between those A sections was one of the smaller movements I'd already conceived. So I took one and squashed it in. That's one way that a piece can become significantly transformed during the act of composition.
Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion is a 1998 musical composition by Melinda Wagner, who was awarded the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the work. A concerto for flute and orchestra, it was commissioned by the Westchester Philharmonic Orchestra, who premiered it May 30, 1998, for flutist and conductor Paul Lustig Dunkel.
The Music Jury came to a unanimous conclusion that Melinda Wagner's Concerto for Flute, Strings and Percussion was by a considerable extent the finest work in this year's list of entries. Her concerto is brilliantly virtuosic not only in the solo flute part but in the superbly integrated orchestra accompaniment. At times passionate, at others poignantly lyric, the work's kaleidoscopic textures and instrumental colors keep the listener completely engrossed.
Lilacs for voice and orchestra is a musical composition by George T. Walker Jr. (1922–2018) that was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The work, scored for soprano soloist and orchestra, was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer prize jury. Walker was the first African-American composer to be awarded the prize.
Whispers Out of Time (1984) is a composition by Roger Reynolds for string orchestra. He was awarded the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the piece, causing Kyle Gann to quip that it was the first time it was being given to an experimental composer since Charles Ives in 1947. It premiered on December 11, 1988, at Buckley Recital Hall, Amherst College, Massachusetts, with Harvey Sollberger conducting.
- The soul is a captive
- A magma of interiors
- Like a wave breaking on a rock
- The surprise, the tension are in the concept
- A chill, a blight moving outward
- The portrait's will to endure
Symphony No. 3, Op. 75 (1955) is Ernst Toch's (1887—1964) third of seven symphonies. He was awarded the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Music for the piece. Premiered December 2, 1955 by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by William Steinberg, it was commissioned by the American Jewish Tercentenary Committee of Chicago.
The Canticle of the Sun is a musical composition by Leo Sowerby (1895–1968) setting Matthew Arnold's English translation of Francis of Assisi's "Canticle of the Sun" for chorus and orchestra in 1945; the work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year. The first performance was in New York at Carnegie Hall by the Schola Cantorum and the New York Philharmonic on April 16, 1945. The first recording of it by Chicago's Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus under Carlos Kalmar was released in June 2011. The piece was commissioned by the Alice M. Ditson Fund.
Christopher Cerrone is an American composer based in New York City. He was a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a 2014 Fromm Foundation commission recipient, a 2015 Rome Prize winner in Music Composition, and has received numerous awards from ASCAP.
Variations for Orchestra is a single-movement composition for orchestra by the American composer Leslie Bassett. The piece was first performed in Rome in 1963 by the RAI National Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Ferruccio Scaglia. It was later given its United States premiere at the Philadelphia Academy of Music on October 22, 1965 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. The work was awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People is book about European migrations into the United States by Oscar Handlin. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952.
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
