Ellen Taaffe Zwilich


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 post-modernist, neo-romantic 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 currently serves as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.

Biography

Zwilich was born in Miami, Florida, and began her studies as a violinist, earning a B.M. from Florida State University in 1960. She moved to New York City to play with the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. She later enrolled at Juilliard, eventually 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 Zwilich. He died in 1979, after which point Taaffe Zwilich refocused her compositional efforts on "communicating more directly with performers and listeners," softening her somewhat harsh, jagged style.
Her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra in 1982, and it won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize, after which point her popularity and income from commissions ensured that she could devote herself to composing full-time. From 1995-99 she was the first occupant of the Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall; while there, she created the "Making Music" concert series, which focuses on performances and lectures by living composers, a series which is still in existence.
She has received a number of other honors, including the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and four Grammy nominations. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1999 she was designated Musical America's Composer of the Year. She is currently a professor at Florida State University, and has served for many years on the Advisory Panel of the BMI Foundation, Inc. In 2009 she became the Chair of the BMI Student Composer Awards following Milton Babbitt and William Schuman. To date she has received six honorary doctorates.

Musical career

Zwilich's compositional style is marked by an obsession with "the idea of generating an entire work – large-scale structure, melodic and harmonic language, and developmental processes – from its initial motives." In addition to large scale orchestral works like Symbolon, Symphony no.2 , and Symphony no.3, all of which were commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, she has written a number of notable, smaller-scale concertos for relatively uncommon instruments. These include works for trombone, bass trombone, flute, oboe, bassoon, horn, trumpet and clarinet. She has also written a small number of choral works and song cycles. Zwilich's music was conducted by Pierre Boulez at Juilliard in 1975. Her major breakthrough came after winning the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony No. 1. Following this, she was commissioned to work on her Symphony No. 2 for the San Francisco Symphony and Symphony No. 3 for the New York Philharmonic's 150th anniversary. Zwilich's orchestral work Symbolon was also commissioned by New York Philharmonic and performed in Europe, Asia and America.

Symphonies