Steven Stucky Concerto Wins Pulitzer Prize

Steven Stucky

(April 5, 2005) - Yaddo composer Steven Stucky was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Music on Monday for “Second Concerto for Orchestra,” which received its world premiere March 12, 2004, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

Mr. Stucky has spent the last 17 years working with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was appointed as composer in residence in 1988 and has most recently been its consulting composer for new music. He also is the Given Foundation Professor of Composition at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1980. He was a guest at Yaddo in 1988.

Asked for his reaction to the prize, Mr. Stucky said: “It is nice to get it over with. I’ve flirted with it a couple of times.” He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for “Concerto for Orchestra.”

Mr. Stucky has written works for dozens of philharmonics and symphonies throughout the world and is the founder of Ensemble X, an orchestra that draws its membership primarily from the staffs of Cornell and Ithaca College. He won the the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for his book Lutoslawski and His Music and in 2002 was awarded a $15,000 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Other honors include the ASCAP Victor Herbert Prize from the American Society of University Composers and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

The Pulitzer Prize in Music is awarded for a “distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year.” It includes a $10,000 cash prize. The awards will be formally presented at a luncheon on May 23 at Columbia University.