The Pulitzer Prize for Music: My top five picks

The Academy Awards for films, the Grammys for music, and the Tonys for theater—these are among the most prestigious awards in the disciplines of creative arts. What most people don’t know is that the Pulitzer Prize, an award presented annually by Columbia University to celebrate the best of journalism, is also considered to be the most distinguished honor that an American contemporary composer could receive.

The winning works are selected by a rotating jury consisting of some of the most renowned composers in the U.S., many of whom are past winners. As a composition student myself, these are among my most admired works of contemporary music, and I would love to share them with more aspiring artists. To help you get started, here are my picks for the top five Pulitzer-winning works.

“Become Ocean,” by John Luther Adams ( 2014 winner)

As someone who spent the majority of his life in Alaska, it should come as no surprise that Adams’ “Become Ocean” is inspired by the Pacific coast of Alaska.

Regarding the title, Adams said, “As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.”

A major feature of this piece is the composer’s unconventional division of the orchestra into three spatially-separated parts, with each group acting independently, creating an otherworldly sound scape.

As New Yorker music critic Alex Ross remarked, “‘Become Ocean’ “may be the loveliest apocalypse in musical history.”

The work also won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

“Appalachian Spring,” by Aaron Copland (1945 winner)

Originally a ballet, “Appalachian Spring” was later orchestrated into an orchestral suite by Copland, which achieved wide-spread popularity. The work premiered at the Library of Congress, and Copland’s characteristic quintal harmonies used during this piece are viewed by many musicologists as a reaffirmation of America during the postwar era.

The most well-known part of the piece is probably the seventh movement, during which Copland incorporated a series of ingenious variations on the Shaker hymn song “Simple Gift.”

“Partita for 8 Voices,” by Caroline Shaw (2013 winner)

A native of North Carolina, Carolina Shaw is among the handful of women who have won the prize, as well as the youngest winner so far at age 30.

The Pulitzer jury praised her “Partita for 8 Voices” as “an inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects.”

The work is in four movements and only uses the authentic voice of eight humans as sound sources. Through this piece, Shaw has opened the gate to an entirely new world of vocal music that beckons further exploration.

Trombone Concerto, by Christopher Rouse (1993 winner)

Praised as “distinctive, unsettling, yet structurally clear” by The New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein, Rouse’s trombone concerto is truly a masterpiece that has transformed the existing trombone repertoire. The piece was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered by the orchestra in 1992. The last movement of the concerto is dedicated to the legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein, whose sudden death in 1990 shocked the music world.

“Silent Night: Opera in Two Acts,” by Kevin Puts (2012 winner)

Inspired by the 2005 film “Joyeux Noël,” Kevin Puts’s opera “Silent Night” depicts the famous Christmas Truce during World War I from the perspective of German, Scottish and French soldiers. In two acts, the opera chronologically details the event through three separate timelines that merge together at the end.

Through stunning arias, Puts reflects the main message that the opera’s librettist Mark Campbell wants to convey—that “war is not sustainable when you come to know your enemy as a person.”

It’s impossible to cover the merits of all the winning works in such a short review, so here are five honorable mentions that are definitely worth listening to: