Paul Moravec has won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for music for his Tempest
Fantasy. The $10,000 award, given for a "distinguished musical composition of significant
dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States
during the year," is administered by the Columbia University School of
Journalism in New York City and was announced there on Monday (5 April).
Born in Buffalo in 1957 — and no relation to
the Czech pianist Ivan Moravec — Paul Moravec is a graduate of Harvard
and Columbia Universities and has taught at both schools as well as at Dartmouth
College in New Hampshire and Hunter College of the City 
University of New York; he
is currently chair of the music department at Adelphi University on Long Island
in New York state. Among his previous awards and honors are the Rome Prize;
fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts, the Camargo
Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation; and a Charles Ives Fellowship from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Moravec is considered a leading member of a group of composers, mostly American, termed by some observers the "New Tonalists." On the biography page at the Web site of his publisher, Subito Music, Moravec says that "the idea one hears occasionally that being a tonal composer is somehow special or unusual strikes me as weird! As a Westerner, and American culture is by and large part of Western civilization, using tonality seems entirely natural in a sense . Western music IS tonality! That a single system in its various manifestations can transcend all boundaries of space and time, can embrace all types of musical expressions, high to low, sacred to profane, for over 500 years, is truly amazing. It is one of the greatest intellectual achievements in human history."
Written for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, Tempest Variations was premiered on 2 May 2003 by David Krakauer and the Trio Solisti at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The composer has described the work as "a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest. Rather than trying to depict these elements in programmatic terms, the music simply uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy."
The other finalists for the 2004 music Pulitzer were Peter Lieberson for his Piano Concerto No. 3, which was premiered by soloist Peter Serkin and the Minnesota Orchestra under conductor Oliver Knussen on 26 November 2003 in Minneapolis; and Steve Reich for Cello Counterpoint for solo cellist plus tape and video, written for Maya Beiser, who gave the first performance in Champaign, Illinois on 18 October 2003 and has subsequently performed it at Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Steve Reich Festival in the Hague, on the U.S. West Coast and at the Sydney Festival. This was Reich's second year in a row as a finalist (he was nominated in 2003 for the video opera Three Tales); Lieberson was a finalist in 2002 (for Rilke Songs), 1996 (for his Variations for Violin and Piano) and 1984 (for his Piano Concerto No. 1).
This year's Pulitzer music jurors included Robert Ward, professor emeritus at
Duke University; Wayne Peterson, professor emeritus
of composition at San Francisco State University; David Baker, chairman of the
jazz department at the Indiana University School of Music; Ara Guzelimian,
senior director and artistic advisor at Carnegie Hall in New York City; and Tim
Page, andante contributor and music critic for The Washington
Post. The music jurors select the finalists; the actual prizewinner is
chosen by the same Pulitzer Prize Board that selects the recipients of the
journalism and letters awards.
