April is Pulitzer Prize time. This year marks the centennial of the award, which honors excellence in journalism and the arts. Media interest is cresting in advance of the naming of the 2016 honorees, which will take place tomorrow.
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll take a look at the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, in the fields of journalism, education, letters and drama. The music prize didn’t come along until 1943.
Of the dozens of pieces honored over the years, surprisingly few have remained in the public consciousness. Only Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and perhaps Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3 “The Camp Meeting” have established themselves firmly in the repertoire – though the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti and Robert Ward are occasionally revived.
I thought we’d spend yet another hour in what has become an annual salute with some perhaps lesser-known works, though their lack of familiarity is certainly no reflection on the quality of the music or the talent of the composers themselves.
We’ll hear a piece by Norman Dello Joio, who was awarded a Pulitzer for his “Meditations on Ecclesiastes” in 1957. You know the famous Bible verse, from Book Three of Ecclesiastes, which begins “To everything there is a season.” Its twelve sections consist of an introduction, a statement of a theme, and then ten variations on that theme, calibrated to reflect the verses’ inner meanings. We’ll hear the strings of the Oregon Symphony conducted by James DePriest.
Then we’ll turn to a deserving work from more recent times. Caroline Shaw, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, was 30 years old when she received her award in 2013, making her the youngest Pulitzer winner in her category.
She was recognized for a virtuosic piece of “a cappella” writing, her “Partita for 8 Voices,” composed between 2009 and 2012. Shaw wrote it for performance by her ensemble, Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a founding member. Roomful of Teeth is well-versed in world styles, and the “Partita” reflects the group’s mastery of a broad array of genres and idioms.
The Pulitzer committee cited Shaw’s creation as a “highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.” Its four movements are titled after baroque dance forms – Allemande, Sarabande, Courante and Passacaglia. The texts are drawn from instructions for a wall drawing by Sol Lewitt, “Wall Drawing 305,” currently on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. The performance on this recording, issued on New Amsterdam Records, is incredible.
I hope you’ll join me for “Pulitzer Prized” – music by recipients of one of music’s most prestigious awards – this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
