Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is one of the most recognized, performed, and sought-after composers active today. She was the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. Zwilich (ZWIL-ik) was born Ellen Taaffe (tayf) on April 30, 1939, in Miami. Her father was an airline pilot. Her mother enjoyed music and owned a piano but never played it. Her first instrument was the violin. Zwilich graduated from Florida State University with a music degree in 1960. After finishing her degree, she landed a place in Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony Orchestra and moved to New York. Becoming interested in composition, she enrolled at the Juilliard School in Manhattan and studied with such prominent composers as John Boda, Elliott Carter, and Roger Sessions. The Juilliard Symphony Orchestra under conductor Pierre Boulez programmed Zwilich's Symposium for Orchestra in 1975. At first, Zwilich wrote music in the modernist vein pursued by her teachers, but after the death of her husband, violinist Joseph Zwilich in 1979, she felt a need to communicate with audiences more directly and adopted an idiom that, though contemporary, was marked by influences from Romanticism. Her Symphony No. 1 of 1982 was programmed by the American Composers Orchestra and garnered her the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year. That generated a steady stream of commissions from major American orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the Boston Symphony. Zwilich fulfilled those commissions with further symphonies and a series of concertos that has continued through a cello concerto in 2020. Zwilich has also composed a large amount of chamber music, commissioned by such prestigious groups as the Emerson Quartet. She is the founder of the "Making Music" concert and lecture series, and she composed Peanuts Gallery (1997), based on characters in the Charles Schulz comic strip, for a family concert series at Carnegie Hall. By the early 2020s, some 50 of Zwilich's compositions had been recorded, some multiple times. A longtime professor at her alma mater, Florida State, Zwilich is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. ~ James Manheim, Rovi