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SOCIETY FOR POLISH MUSIC |
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Steven Stucky Wins the 2005 Pulitzer Prize
 Photo of Steven Stucky by Betty Freeman Steven Stucky, composer, music historian, professor of composition at Cornell University and new music advisor at the Los Angeles Philharmonic has won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Second Concerto for Orchestra. The concerto was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Hall on March 12, 2004. The prize, in a modest amount of $10,000, recognizes compositions of significant dimensions written by an American and first performed in the U.S. Two-time winner Elliott Carter [Dialogues] and Steve Reich [You Are (Variations)] were finalists. The jury included: composer Gunther Schuller, jazz pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams, composer Christopher Rouse, conductor David Zinman, and Los Angeles Times music critic, Mark Swed. Born in 1949, Stucky has taught at Cornell University since 1980 and has been associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1988 (as composer-in-residence, artistic advisor to the New Music Group and new music advisor). He previously was a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for his first Concerto for Orchestra and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986 among other prizes. He was commissioned to compose music for numerous American orchestras, including Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Philadelphia and St. Louis, as well as Chanticleer, the Boston Musica Viva, the Camerata Bern, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the Howard Hanson Institute of American Music, Carnegie Hall, the BBC, recorder soloist Michala Petri and guitarist Manuel Barrueco. Prof. Stucky is a renowned Lutosławski specialist, frequently lecturing about and teaching the music of the great Polish composer. He won the 1981 ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for his book Lutosławski and His Music.. Zbigniew Skowron's edited volume, Lutosławski Studies, published by Oxford University Press in 2002, included Stucky's article on Lutosławski's style, summarizing the continuities in the Polish composer's musical language through the span of his entire career. Stucky's most recent paper about Lutosławski's influence on younger composer, including Salonen and himself, was presented at the Symposium of International Musicological Society in Melbourne, Australia, during a special session commemorating the 10th anniversary of Lutosławski's death. The text will appear, along with other papers from the session, in a book edited by Dr. Martina Homma. Prof. Stucky is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Polish Music.
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