David Lang wins Pulitzer prize April 8 2008
The 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music was awarded yesterday to composer David Lang for his piece The Little Match Girl Passion, a setting of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Little Match Girl in a structure that echoes Bach’s St Matthew Passion. The piece was commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered in October 2007 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall in a performance with sopranos Miriam Andersen and Bente Vist, tenor Christopher Watson, and bass-baritone Jakob Bloch Jespersen.

composer David Lang (photo: Peter Serling, 2003)

Lang’s own works have been performed by ensembles as varied as the New York Philharmonic to the Kronos Quartet. His music has also been played at the BBC Proms, the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Festival, and the Munich Biennale, among many other venues. However, Lang is probably best known as one of the founding forces behind New York’s “downtown” music collective, Bang on a Can, whose activities range from acting as presenters both in New York and on tours, hosting its own “All-Stars” ensemble of musicians and composers, holding a yearly summer institute in Massachusetts for young musicians interested in new music, and running their own record label called Cantaloupe.

As with last year’s award, the Pulitzer jurors are skewing away from a long stream of “academic” composers who have won the prize in the past. The 2007 music winner was jazz legend Ornette Coleman, a composer and saxophonist firmly ensconced in the music’s avant-garde. (In 2004, the Pulitzer governing board revised the music entry requirements in such a way that jazz, film scores, and works for musical theatre would be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize.)

A special citation was also given to Bob Dylan “for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” Of additional interest to classical music lovers, Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post was given the Feature Writing Prize for his piece about violinist Joshua Bell’s experiment in playing anonymously for commuters in a DC subway station during morning rush hour.

The Pulitzer Prize carries a cash award of US$10,000. This year’s music jurors were Ingrid Monson, the chair of Harvard University’s music department (who also serves as the Quincy Jones professor of African-American music at Harvard); composer Dwight Andrews, who also is an associate professor of music theory and jazz studies at Atlanta’s Emory University; Steven Blier, who teaches at Juilliard and is also the artistic director and co-founder of the New York Festival of Song; The Washington Post music critic Tim Page (currently on leave from the paper); and composer Steven Stucky, who is the Given Foundation professor of composition at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Both Page and Stucky are Pulitzer Prize winners themselves.

Along with Lang’s piece, the other 2008 music finalists were Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile, commissioned for the group eighth blackbird, which premiered in November 2007 at the University of Richmond, and Robert Sierra’s Concerto for Viola, which also premiered in November 2007 at Cornell University’s Barnes Hall in a performance with soloist Wendy Richman and the Cornell Chamber Orchestra.

Anastasia Tsioulcas, North American section editor