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Pulitzer Prize for Music
The Pulitzer Prize for Music was first awarded in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer did not call for such a prize in his will, but had arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year. This was eventually converted into a full-fledged prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant...
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William Schuman
William Howard Schuman (August 4, 1910–February 15, 1992) was an American composer and music administrator.
Born in the Bronx in New York City to Samuel and Rachel Schuman, Schuman was named after the twenty-seventh U.S. president, William Howard...
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Howard Hanson
Howard Harold Hanson (October 28, 1896 – February 26, 1981) was an American composer, conductor, educator, music theorist, and ardent champion of American classical music. Director for 40 years of the Eastman School of Music, he built a top quality...
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Aaron Copland
Aaron Copland (November 14, 1900 – December 2, 1990) was an American composer of concert and film music, as well as an accomplished pianist. Instrumental in forging a distinctly American style of composition, he was widely known as "the dean of...
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Leo Sowerby
Leo Sowerby (May 1, 1895–July 7, 1968), American composer and church musician, was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1946, and was often called the “Dean of American church music” in the early to mid 20th century.
Sowerby was born in...
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Charles Ives
Charles Edward Ives (October 20, 1874 – May 19, 1954) was an American modernist composer. He is widely regarded as one of the first American composers of international significance. Ives' music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his...
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Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 - September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic from Kansas City, Missouri. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist , a...
Douglas Stuart Moore
Douglas Stuart Moore (August 10, 1893 - July 25, 1969) was an American composer, educator, and author. He wrote for music the theater, film, ballet and orchestra, but his greatest fame was for his two operas The Devil and Daniel Webster (1938) and...
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Gail Kubik
Gail Thompson Kubik (September 5, 1914, South Coffeyville, Oklahoma – July 20, 1984, Covina, California) was an American composer, motion picture scorist, violinist, and teacher. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, the American Conservatory...
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Quincy Porter
Quincy Porter (7 February 1897 – 12 November 1966) was an American composer and teacher of classical music.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, he went to Yale University where his teachers included Horatio Parker and David Stanley Smith. Porter...
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Gian Carlo Menotti
Gian Carlo Menotti (July 7, 1911 – February 1, 2007) was an Italian-American composer and librettist. Although he often referred to himself as an American composer, he kept his Italian citizenship. He wrote the classic Christmas opera Amahl and the...
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Ernst Toch
Ernst Toch (German pronunciation: [ˈtox]; 7 December 1887 Vienna — 1 October 1964 Santa Monica) was a composer of classical music and film scores.
Toch, born in Vienna in the family of a humble Jewish leather dealer when the city was at its 19th...
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Norman Dello Joio
Norman Dello Joio (January 24, 1913 – July 24, 2008) was an American composer.
He was born Nicodemo DeGioio in New York City to Italian immigrants; the spelling "Gioio" was later anglicized to "Joio". He began his musical career as organist and...
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John La Montaine
John La Montaine (b. Oak Park, Illinois, United States, 17 March 1920) is an American composer who won the 1959 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Piano Concerto no. 1, Op. 9, "In Time of War" (1958), which was premiered by Jorge Bolet.
His teachers...
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Walter Piston
Walter Hamor Piston Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976) was an American composer and music theorist.
Piston was born in Rockland, Maine. His father's father, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to...
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Samuel Barber
Samuel Osborne Barber II (March 9, 1910 – January 23, 1981) was an American composer of orchestral, opera, choral, and piano music. His Adagio for Strings is his most popular composition and widely considered a masterpiece of modern classical music....
Leslie Bassett
Leslie Bassett (born January 22, 1923 in Hanford, California) is an American composer of classical music, and the University of Michigan’s Albert A. Stanley Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Composition. Bassett received the 1966...
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Leon Kirchner
Leon Kirchner (January 24, 1919 – September 17, 2009) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kirchner was born in Brooklyn,...
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George Crumb
George Crumb (born October 24, 1929) is an American composer of modern and avant-garde music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres and extended technique. Examples include spoken flute (one speaks while blowing into the instrument) and...
Karel Husa
Karel Husa (born August 7, 1921 in Prague) is a Czech-born classical composer and conductor, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and 1993 Grawemeyer Award in Music. In 1954 he came to the United States and became American citizen in 1959.
Husa learned...
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Mario Davidovsky
Mario Davidovsky (born March 4, 1934) is an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the US, where he lives today. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance...
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Jacob Druckman
Jacob Druckman (June 26, 1928 – May 24, 1996) was an American composer born in Philadelphia. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Druckman studied with Vincent Persichetti, Peter Mennin, and Bernard Wagenaar. In 1949 and 1950 he studied with Aaron...
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Elliott Carter
Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. (born December 11, 1908) is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer born and living in New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a...
Donald Martino
Donald Martino (May 16, 1931 – December 8, 2005) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Martino studied composition with Ernst Bacon, Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Most of his mature...
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Dominick Argento
Dominick Argento (b. October 27, 1927, York, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, best known as a leading composer of lyric opera and choral music. Among his most prominent pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, and The...
Ned Rorem
Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923) is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and praised for his song settings.
He was born in Richmond, Indiana and received his early education in Chicago at the University of...
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Richard Wernick
Richard Wernick (born January 16, 1934) in Boston, Massachusetts is a US composer.
Wernick studied with Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, Ernst Toch, Aaron Copland, and Boris Blacher at Brandeis University, and with Leon Kirchner at Mills...
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Michael Colgrass
Michael Colgrass (b. April 22, 1932, Chicago, Illinois) is an American-born musician, composer, and educator.
His musical career began in Chicago as a jazz musician (1944 - 49). He graduated from the University of Illinois (1954) with a degree in...
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David Del Tredici
David Del Tredici, born March 16, 1937 in Cloverdale, California, is an American composer.
After making his piano debut with the San Francisco Symphony at 17, he went on to receive a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.F.A. in...
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Roger Sessions
Roger Huntington Sessions (28 December 1896 – 16 March 1985) was an American composer, critic and teacher of music.
Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. He studied music at...
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Ellen Zwilich
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...
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Bernard Rands
Bernard Rands (born Sheffield, England, 2 March 1934) is a composer of contemporary classical music.
Rands studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt,...
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Stephen Albert
Stephen Albert (6 February 1941 – 27 December 1992) was an American composer. Born in New York City on 6 February 1941, Albert began his musical training on the piano, French horn, and trumpet as a youngster. He first studied composition at the age...
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Charles Wuorinen
Charles Wuorinen (b. June 9, 1938 in New York City) is an American composer. Wuorinen is a prolific composer in all genres and a high profile proponent of contemporary music. In 1970, Wuorinen became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize...
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George Perle
George Perle (May 6, 1915 – January 23, 2009) was a composer and music theorist. He was born in Bayonne, New Jersey. A student of Ernst Krenek, Perle composed with a technique of his own devising called "twelve-tone tonality," which is different...
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William Bolcom
William Elden Bolcom (born May 26, 1938) is an American composer and pianist. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Medal of Arts, two Grammy Awards, and the Detroit Music Award. Bolcom taught composition at the University of Michigan...
Shulamit Ran
Shulamit Ran (Hebrew: שולמית רן; born October 21, 1949 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer...
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Gunther Schuller
Gunther Schuller (born November 22, 1925) is an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, and jazz musician.
The son of a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, he studied at the Saint Thomas Choir School and became an...
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Wayne Peterson
Wayne Peterson (b. 1927, Albert Lea, Minnesota) is a musical composer, pianist, and educator.
Peterson earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Minnesota. He did advanced study on a Fulbright Scholarship at the Royal Academy of...
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Ornette Coleman
Ornette Coleman (born March 9, 1930) is an American saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter and composer. He was one of the major innovators of the free jazz movement of the 1960s.
Coleman's timbre is easily recognized: his keening, crying sound draws...
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Morton Gould
Morton Gould (December 10, 1913 – February 21, 1996) was an American composer, conductor, arranger, and pianist.
Born in Richmond Hill, New York, Gould was recognized early as a child prodigy with abilities in improvisation and composition. His...
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Aaron Jay Kernis
Aaron Jay Kernis (born January 15, 1960) is an American composer.
Aaron Jay Kernis was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Manhattan School of Music, the San Francisco Conservatory, and Yale University (under John Adams, Jacob...
Melinda Wagner
Melinda Wagner (born 1957 in Philadelphia) is a US composer, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Her undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the ...
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Lewis Spratlan
Lewis Spratlan (b. 1940, Miami, United States) is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He studied composition with Mel Powell at Yale University, where he was a member of the Yale Spizzwinks(?).
Spratlan joined the faculty of...
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John Corigliano
John Corigliano (born February 16, 1938, New York City, New York) is an American composer of classical music and a teacher of music. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College in the City University of New York.
Italian American...
Henry Brant
Henry Dreyfuss Brant (September 15, 1913 – April 26, 2008) was a Canadian-born American composer. An expert orchestrator with a flair for experimentation, many of Brant's works featured spatialization techniques.
Brant was born in Montreal, Quebec,...
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John Coolidge Adams
John Coolidge Adams (born February 15, 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in minimalism. His best-known works include On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the September...
Paul Moravec
Paul Moravec (born November 2, 1957, in Buffalo, New York) is an American composer and the Music Department Chair at Adelphi University on Long Island, New York. Already a prolific composer, he has been described as a "new tonalist." He is best...
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Steven Stucky
Steven Stucky (pronounced /ˈstʌki/) (born November 7, 1949) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Stucky was born in Hutchinson, Kansas. At age 9, he moved with his family to Abilene, Texas, where, as a teenager, he studied music in the...
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Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter and composer. He is among the most prominent jazz musicians of the modern era and is also a well-known instrumentalist in classical music. He is also the Artistic Director of...
Yehudi Wyner
Yehudi Wyner (born June 1, 1929 in Calgary, Alberta) is an American composer, pianist, conductor, and music educator.
Wyner, who grew up in New York City, was raised in a musical family. His father, Lazar Weiner, was an eminent composer of Yiddish...
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Christopher Rouse
Christopher Rouse (born 1958) is an American film editor who won the Academy Award for Film Editing and the BAFTA Award for Best Editing for the film The Bourne Ultimatum (2007). His father, Russell Rouse, was a writer, director and producer. His...
David Lang
David Lang (born January 8, 1957 in Los Angeles, California) is an American composer living in New York City. He was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion.
Lang holds degrees from Stanford University, the...
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Steve Reich
Stephen Michael Reich (pronounced /'raɪʃ/; born October 3, 1936) is an American composer who pioneered the style of minimalist music. His innovations include using tape loops to create phasing patterns (examples are his early compositions, "It's...
