Paul Moravec

With an accessible style that has been described as neo-tonalist, Paul Moravec has become one of the most frequently performed contemporary composers. Moravec received the Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 2004 chamber work Tempest Fantasy. Moravec was born in Buffalo, New York, on November 2, 1957. He attended Harvard University, where he sang with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and earned a B.A. in composition. A Prix de Rome winner, he studied at the American Academy in Rome before earning his master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. Upon completing his D.M.A. at Columbia, he was hired by Dartmouth College, where he taught until 1996. He moved to Hunter College in 1997 and to Adelphi University on Long Island, where he remains on the faculty. He also served as composer-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 2007-2008. Moravec revealed his struggles with depression in a National Public Radio interview. "In essence, I came out,” he told The New York Times, "speaking about something very personal, in part because I hoped to help overcome the stigma that attaches to mental illness." Moravec identified his recovery as an inspiration behind the Tempest Fantasy, a work for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano that won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in music. Other well-known Moravec works include Northern Lights Electric (1994), Fire/Ice/Air (1998, depicting the voyages of Charles Lindbergh and Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott), and the oratorio Blizzard Voices (2008), which commemorated the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888 in which many children died. Moravec returned to the American Academy of Rome as composer-in-residence in 2013. His oratorio Sanctuary Road, about the Underground Railroad, was premiered by the Oratorio Society of New York in 2018 and released on the Naxos label in 2020. More than two dozen other Moravec works had been recorded as of that time.