Pulitzer Prize For Music - Criticism

Criticism

Donald Martino, the 1974 winner, said, "If you write music long enough, sooner or later, someone is going to take pity on you and give you the damn thing. It is not always the award for the best piece of the year; it has gone to whoever hasn't gotten it before."

John Corigliano, the winner in 2001, said that although the Pulitzer Prize for Music was intended to be for music that meant something to the world, it had become a very different kind of award: "by composers for composers" and "mired in a pool of rotating jurors." Indeed, in 1998, after researching the Pulitzer Prize for Music, music critic Kyle Gann wrote that the awards panel often included "the same seven names over and over as judges": Gunther Schuller, Joseph Schwantner, Jacob Druckman (now deceased), George Perle, John Harbison, Mario Davidovsky, and Bernard Rands. Gann concluded that since all of these composers are white men, and generally have same "narrow Eurocentric aesthetic" that the prize has been unfairly biased.

After winning the award in 2003, John Adams expressed "ambivalence bordering on contempt" because "most of the country's greatest musical minds" have been ignored in favor of academic music.

Concerning the 2004 changes, Gunther Schuller said, "This is a long overdue sea change in the whole attitude as to what can be considered for the prize. It is an opening up to different styles and not at all to different levels of quality." Other former winners disagreed. Stephen Hartke publicly criticized the changes, and John Harbison called them "a horrible development."

Lewis Spratlan (who won the Prize in 2000) also showed concern at this change, but not because of its incorporation of previously-neglected styles (Many of Spratlan’s own works fundamentally incorporate a variety of styles, including jazz-like idiosyncrasies. Rather, Spratlan protests the equation of musical songwriting and movie scoring with academic composition, believing them to be incapable of functioning as unique and influential works. He expressed his concern that equating the music of musicals and movies with the exploratory endeavors of academic composers is to pervert the prestige and original intent of the Pulitzer Prize:

“The Pulitzer is one of the very few prizes that award artistic distinction in front-edge, risk-taking music. To dilute this objective by inviting...musicals and movie scores, no matter how excellent, is to undermine the distinctiveness and capability for artistic advancement....”

The music critic Greg Sandow responded: "What's really going on here...is a last-ditch defense of the obsolete and snobbish idea that only classical music can be art...I wonder if Hartke, Harbison, and others aren't (whether they know it or not) simply trying to protect their turf, trying to preserve some distinction, some chance at prestige and momentary fame, that might elude them if the Pulitzer prize were given simply for artistic merit." The hope was that the rules changes would "level the playing field", but in 2004 Sandow reported that the Pulitzer board's nomination materials sent "a pretty clear message classical works with notated scores are still our first priority."