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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida) 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.[citation needed] 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 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 (in 1975) 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.
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