Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida) 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 matured to a post-modernist, neo-romantic style. She has been called "one of America’s most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers."
Zwilich began her studies as a violinist, earning a B.M. from Florida...
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Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida) 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 matured to a post-modernist, neo-romantic style. She has been called "one of America’s most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers."
Zwilich began her studies as a violinist, earning a B.M. from Florida State University in 1960. She moved to New York to play with the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. She later enrolled at Juilliard, eventually (in 1975) becoming the first woman to earn the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in composition. Her teachers included John Boda, Elliott Carter, and Roger Sessions. She first came to prominence when Pierre Boulez programmed her Symposium for Orchestra with the Juilliard Symphony Orchestra in 1975.
Some of her work during this period was written for her husband, violinist Joseph...
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