Pulitzer Board Expands Its Musical Horizons

Pulitzer Board Expands Its Musical Horizons
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

The governing board of the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and the arts will announce today a broadening of the category for the award in music that would open the door to musical theater scores, film scores and works containing large elements of improvisation, in theory even an improvised jam session with a jazz ensemble.

The move is sure to win plaudits in some circles, especially in Hollywood, on Broadway and within organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center, while provoking criticism among more traditional composers at many of America's universities.

The current definition of what constitutes a "distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year," is being revised to reflect "a broad view of serious music," to quote the board announcement.

The new definition opens eligibility to works that have been recorded during the previous year. In the past, the award has typically gone to symphonic and chamber works from the "contemporary classical tradition," in the words of the board, or to operas, choral works and occasionally a jazz-inflected score like Wynton Marsalis's ambitious "All Rise," for chorus, soloists and orchestra.

Until now all new works submitted for consideration had to include a completely notated score as well as a live recording. With the new definition a recording of a work that has no written-out score will be deemed sufficient, which will certainly lend a new dimension to the deliberations of the five-member jury that selects three finalists for consideration by the full board. The changes are sure to please the composer John Adams, who after receiving the award in 2003 for "On the Transmigration of Souls," a New York Philharmonic commission written in response to the 9/11 attacks, issued a blistering public critique of the prize. "Among musicians that I know," Mr. Adams wrote at the time in a widely distributed e-mail message, "the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism."

Anyone perusing the list of winners, he continued, cannot help noticing the absence of most of America's greatest musical minds, from mavericks like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Harry Partch, to composer-performers like Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk and Meredith Monk. These creative spirits, he wrote, had been passed over year after year, "often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes."

In a recent interview Ara Guzelimian, senior director and artistic adviser at Carnegie Hall, who was a member of the jury for the 2004 music prize, said Mr. Adams's comments were taken by the board as "very strong medicine." To its credit, he added, with this expansion of the category, the board has acknowledged "that there is a larger realm of American music than has been represented so far."

Not all composers will agree. The argument against the broadening will be that composers working in the commercial fields of film and musical theater already attract enormous attention and are eligible for high-profile Tony Awards and Oscars and such. Many of the composers often dubbed academic are deserving and accomplished creators who work in relative obscurity and benefit hugely by the prestige of the Pulitzer. You don't see the board opening the prizes in journalism to television correspondents and writers for online magazines.

Still, it's hard to deny that a music prize inaugurated in 1943 that has eluded towering figures in American music like Duke Ellington (who received a posthumous special citation in 1999 to commemorate his centennial), or Steve Reich, a finalist from last year, has been too constricted in its purview.

Several musicals have won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, including Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific," Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George" and Jonathan Larson's "Rent." Musical theater works, which involve close collaboration with directors and book writers, are natural candidates for the drama prize. It's hard to evaluate the music without its dramatic context. Still, I would argue that Mr. Sondheim's score for "Sweeney Todd" was by far the most distinguished music introduced by an American composer in 1979. And for sheer musical inventiveness, it's hard to top the film scores of Thomas Newman ("The Road to Perdition" and "Finding Nemo." )

The broadening of the category will have no effect, though, if the Pulitzer board does not extend the range of jurors who select the three finalists from the entries, which typically number about 100. For some years the jury pool has consisted of four composers and one critic. What have been missing are performers and concert presenters who commission and champion living composers.

Why not put on the jury the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the pianists Peter Serkin and Gilbert Kalish, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a member of the Juilliard String Quarter or, for a more genre-smashing point of view, a member of the Kronos String Quartet? Such musicians would bring a fresh, pragmatic perspective to the deliberations.

Mr. Guzelimian, whose position at Carnegie Hall involves searching for and commissioning a wide range or living composers, rightly points to his own appointment on the last panel as evidence that the Pulitzer board is moving in that direction. He also said the board should not have trouble finding jurors who open to a wide range of musical styles.

What he did find difficult, though, was the injunction from the board to nominate three finalists without ranking them. "It's hard to pretend that there is an equal reaction to three different composers," he said. "Personally I find it difficult to be even-handed."

In all categories the full Pulitzer board selects the winner from the three unranked finalists recommended by the specialized committees, and this is likely to continue to cause controversy within the arts fields. The board is mostly drawn from distinguished ranks of journalists, editors and academics, including respected scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr. But board members do not profess to have particular expertise in music (or poetry or drama for that matter).

Jay T. Harris, the board member who headed the yearlong study of the music prize and who is the director of the Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California, asserted in a recent interview that the board is "absolutely capable" of rendering such in music. As part of the new procedure, he explained, the jury is instructed to provide detailed descriptions of each finalist to place the work in the larger aesthetic context of its genre. Board members are given CD's of all three works in advance and are expected to listen to them complete.

Still, as Mr. Harris emphasized, the Pulitzer for music, as with all the prizes in arts and letters, is awarded by an "informed group of Americans" relying on the judgments of experts, but is "not a prize for people in the discipline by people in the discipline."

(there was a strong piece in the Voice earlier this year talking about this same issue) but I was struck by this line

"for sheer musical inventiveness, it's hard to top the film scores of Thomas Newman ("The Road to Perdition" and "Finding Nemo." )"

Was the score to Finding Nemo all that great? I don't remember it as being that memorable or did i miss something due to unsuspected bias against animation?

general discussion of the decision would be cool though. I'll also try to find that Voice piece later.