Ellen Taaffe Zwilich ( ; born April 30, 1939) 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 postmodernist, neoromantic style. She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Biography
Ellen Taaffe was born in Miami, Florida.
Some of her work during this period was written for her husband, violinist Joseph Zwilich, who played in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera. while there, she created the "Making Music" concert series, which focuses on performances and lectures by living composers, a series that is still in existence.
She has received a number of other honors, including the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and four Grammy nominations. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1999, she was designated Musical America's Composer of the Year.
Compositional Style
Taaffe Zwilich's compositional style is marked by an obsession with "the idea of generating an entire work – large-scale structure, melodic and harmonic language, and developmental processes – from its initial motives."
Ellen Taaffe's earliest works were exploratory, using techniques like serialism and the twelve-tone technique to find her own style. Zwilich's most noted composition, Symphony No. 1, was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra and premiered in 1982 in Alice Tully Hall in New York. Zwilich notes that Symphony No. 1 was intended to start organically, using older techniques and one musical idea and growing into her own unique composition with modern techniques and unique embellishments.
For example, In Symphony No. 1, Zwilich used traditional principles such as pitch recurrence and explicitly established contrasting areas within her composition as a base to build her own unique composition. This original "motto" follows a specific rhythmic pattern with second and/or ninth intervals followed by their inversions, which would be noted later as part of an indicating technique in her unique style.