Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

American composer and educator

• Born: April 30, 1939
• Place of Birth: Miami, Florida

One of America’s foremost composers, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

Early Life

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was born on April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida. She was adopted by Ruth Howard Taaffe and Edward Taaffe. While neither parent had a musical background, they did own a piano, which immediately attracted her and on which she began to explore the keys at the age of three. By the age of five, she was studying with a neighborhood piano teacher, but she rebelled at having to play the customary children’s pieces. When she was seven or eight years old, she heard the Symphony No. 5 in C minor by Ludwig van Beethoven and was deeply impressed by it.

By the age of thirteen, Zwilich came under the tutelage of Bower Murphy, who taught her to play the trumpet, transpose music into different keys, and perform in chamber ensembles. He also guided her in learning the orchestral repertoire and devising ways to overcome technical problems in trumpet performances.

At Coral Gables High School, Zwilich became an accomplished violinist. Soon she was serving as concert mistress of the school orchestra, principal trumpeter in the band, and student conductor. In addition, she composed pieces for band and orchestra.

After graduating from high school, she entered Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee as a music education major. In her sophomore year, she changed her area of concentration to composition. Her undergraduate years, which culminated in a bachelor’s degree in 1960, found her performing as concert mistress in the university orchestra under the direction of Hungarian composer and pianist Ernst von Dohnanyi; as first trumpeter in the symphonic band; and as a jazz trumpeter. Violin was her principal instrument, and she had the good fortune to study violin with Richard Burgin, a former concert master of the Boston Symphony Orchestra who had joined the FSU faculty. Her composition teachers were John Boda and Carlisle Floyd. Following graduation, Zwilich stayed at FSU and pursued graduate work in composition. She received her master’s degree in 1962.

Life’s Work

After a somewhat less than satisfying year of teaching in a small community in South Carolina, Zwilich arrived in New York City. She resumed her violin studies with Ivan Galamian and his assistant Sally Thomas. She also worked as a freelance musician and, in 1965, began a seven-year stint as a violinist with the American Symphony Orchestra under its founder and conductor, Leopold Stokowski. She gained experience by playing under a variety of guest conductors, some of whom were composers, including Ernest Ansermet, Luciano Berio, Karl Bohn, Eugen Jochum, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Kletzki, Aram Khachaturian, Yehudi Menuhin, Igor Markevitch, Gunther Schuller, and André Previn.

These years solidified her intention to pursue a career as a composer rather than as a performer, and she began to try her hand at the creation of art songs—producing, for example, Einsame Nacht, a setting of six poems by Hermann Hesse that explore the theme of loneliness. This song cycle is stylistically beholden to the Second Viennese School and exhibits both craftsmanship and expressivity within the parameters of this sometimes restrictive school.

When Stokowski relocated to London in 1972, Zwilich left her orchestral position and entered the doctoral program in composition at the Juilliard School. Her principal teachers there were Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter. During her three years at this esteemed institution, she formed the core of her creative personality, much of which is related directly to her extensive background as a performer. Music, for Zwilich, is a unique form of communication; therefore, its sheer sound and how that sound is perceived by an audience illuminate her approach to composition.

By the time she received the doctor of musical arts degree (becoming the first woman ever to achieve this distinction at Juilliard), Zwilich had created an impressive array of works that established her as a powerful new voice in the world of music. Her Sonata in Three Movements for violin and piano—written in 1973 for her husband, Hungarian-born violinist Joseph Zwilich, and performed by him on a European tour that year—won a gold medal at the G. B. Viotti International Composition Competition in 1975. Symposium for Orchestra (1973), introduced by Pierre Boulez and the Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center during the summer of 1975, was declared an official US entry for the International Society for Contemporary Music World Music Days Festival in Paris, France; it was also performed in 1978 in Carnegie Hall by the American Symphony Orchestra under Kazuyoshi Akiyama. As the title suggests, this twelve-minute work in one movement takes an academic point of view wherein the various members of the orchestra offer musical commentary on the subject (theme) under consideration.

Zwilich’s String Quartet (1974), which was awarded the Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, was premiered by the New York String Quartet at Jordan Hall in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 31, 1976. It received subsequent renderings at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, and in 1977, at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado. The composition’s essential materials are set forth in the first movement, a type of prologue, and are incorporated in diverse manner through each of the four movements, the last of which is to be regarded as a closing epilogue. Zwilich’s String Quartet is to be thought of as musical conversation among four equals, the drama of which impels the divergent exchanges of the four strings.

In 1979, while Zwilich was working on Chamber Symphony through a commission from the Boston Musica Viva, conducted by Richard Pittman, her husband died suddenly of a heart attack while the couple was attending a performance by the Stuttgart Ballet in the Metropolitan Opera House; he died shortly after their tenth wedding anniversary. When Zwilich resumed composition on the work, the symphony had evolved into one in which long musical lines are derived from shorter ideas. The solo capacities of the individual instruments are contrasted with a fuller sound created by such devices as instrumental doubling. The Boston premiere on November 30, 1979, was followed by performances in major American and European musical centers, including one that was shown on television in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Only two years before the Chamber Symphony, Zwilich was composing a very different type of chamber music, her Clarino Quartet, dedicated to the memory of her high school trumpet teacher, Bower Murphy. In this unusual work, the piccolo trumpet, playing largely in the clarino register, is exploited handsomely along with the peculiar qualities of the D, C, and B-flat trumpets. The premiere, which took place at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, in March 1979, featured members of the Minnesota Orchestra’s trumpet section; Charles Schlueter played the clarino part on his personally designed valved instrument. The Clarino Quartet received subsequent performances at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, and in Paris, France, by the Pierre Thibaud Ensemble.

Zwilich received a Norlin Foundation Fellowship from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1980 and a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship from 1980 to 1981. These fellowships enabled her to create such works as Passages, a setting of six poems by A. R. Ammons for soprano and chamber ensemble. Commissioned by Boston Musica Viva, the work concerns the various forms of the passage of life and of time. Three Movements for Orchestra, which includes serial techniques as well as traditional tonality, was retitled Symphony No. 1 and was premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Gunther Schuller in New York on May 5, 1982. It was this composition that made musical history when it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1983, outcompeting seventy-nine other entries. Zwilich became the first woman ever to win this prestigious award in its forty-year history. The symphony was recorded by John Nelson and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra in 1986.

During the next decade, Zwilich firmly established herself as one of America’s most respected composers. In May 1991, she received the Ernst von Dohnanyi Citation from her alma mater, Florida State University (FSU), and saw her works featured in the university’s Festival of New Music. Her productivity continued at a staggering pace throughout the 1980s and included both large and small compositions. Fantasy for harpischord received its first hearing in Linda Kobler’s debut recital at Carnegie Hall in 1984. The Double Quartet for strings, commissioned by the Emerson Quartet and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, was premiered on October 21, 1984. (The two quartets are treated as separate but equal entities competing and cooperating with each other.) In the same year, Zwilich completed the Concerto for Trumpet and Five Players.

Symphony No. 2, known as the Cello Symphony because of the prominence given to that section of the orchestra, was introduced by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on November 13, 1985. The Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra League, was premiered on June 26, 1986, at Michigan’s Meadowbrook Festival. Tanzspiel, Zwilich’s first ballet, was commissioned by the New York City Ballet in 1987. Symbalon, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and its conductor Zubin Mehta, was first heard in the city of Leningrad on June 1, 1988, on the Philharmonic’s tour of the Soviet Union. It was the first time that an American orchestral work premiered in the Soviet Union.

Other works include Trio for piano, violin, and cello commissioned by the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio (1987), Trombone Concerto (1988), Flute Concerto (1990), Oboe Concerto (1991), Bass Trombone Concerto (1993), and Symphony No. 3 (1993). Symphony No. 3 was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered by that orchestra under the baton of Jahja Ling, who substituted for Kurt Masur. This work captures the principles on which Zwilich’s art is founded. It is a creation whose roots in the romantic tradition are clearly discernible. The music communicates an oft-told tale, to speak metaphorically, but it does so with such verve and enthusiasm that it sound fresh and engaging.

Zwilich’s grip on her audience continued with increasingly audience-directed compositions and venues. From 1995 until 1999 she held the Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall, the first person to do so. In an attempt to revive interest in art music, she inaugurated the Making Music concert series, bringing audiences together with living composers during both performances and lectures. Among the compositions was her own Peanuts Gallery (1997), an ensemble for piano and orchestra drawing on the characters in the Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz (among whose six musical sketches are Snoopy Does the Samba and Lullaby for Linus). In 1990, while reading the comics, Zwilich had been astonished to see her name in a Peanuts strip: Two of the characters are at a concert and mention her as the composer of a flute concerto. She became a close friend of Schulz afterward, and they collaborated on Peanuts Gallery. The popular Carnegie Hall performance included video of Zwilich with Schulz and his wife, Jean.

The same year Carnegie Hall hosted the premiere of Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. On September 22, 2000, Zwilich marked the opening of the twenty-first century with a premiere of her Millennium Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and pianist Jeffrey Biegel: It is an extended meditation on the century that had just ended. Other new compositions included String Quartet No. 2 (1998), Symphony No. 4 (1999), Partita for Violin and String Orchestra (2000), Openings for Orchestra (2001, revised 2003), Lament for Piano (1999), Rituals for Five Percussionists and Orchestra (2003), and Quartet for Oboe and Strings (2004). This last work was introduced at the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival in New York while Zwilich was composer in residence. Her composition Shadows, for Piano and Orchestra was commissioned by pianist Jeffrey Biegel and premiered with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra on October 28, 2011.

Over the next decade, Zwilich wrote or revised several fanfares and fantasies for viola and violin. She turned primarily to concertos for strings and woodwinds by the early 2020s. In 2019, Zwilich also participated in Kelly Hall-Tompkins's innovative Music Kitchen project, bringing together classical musicians and unhoused people in shelters, for which she composed “Music Kitchen Interplay.”

Remembrance was a recurrent theme in Zwilich's works of that period. Among these were 2013's Memorial (for the Victims of the Sandy Hook Massacre); 2015's Concerto Elegia for Flute and Strings, in honor of her deceased husband; 2020's A Little Violin Music in Memory of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who had died in a violent police encounter; and 2021's Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Mezzo-soprano, Piano, and Orchestra, a tribute to the life of the late Supreme Court justice.

Zwilich was appointed the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor of Composition at FSU in 2000; the university was renamed the position the Marie Krafft Distinguished Professor in 2020. There she endowed the Zwilich Graduate Assistantship in Music Composition.

In 2009, Zwilich was named chair of the BMI Student Composer Awards, one of which has been offered in her name. She has served as an artistic consultant for the BMI Foundation as well.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Zwilich has received many honors for her compositions. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1994 and the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in 2018. The Making Music series brought her the Gotham Award for contributions to musical life for New York City in 1998 and the Miami Performing Arts Center Award in 1999. In 1999 she was also named composer of the year by Music America. Additionally, Zwilich holds honorary doctorates from Mannes College, the New School for Music, Marymount Manhattan College, Converse College, Manhattanville College, and Oberlin, as well as the key to Cincinnati, given during the city’s Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Day in 2000. She became an honorary member of the Society for American Music (SAM) in 2014 and received the 2023 Composers Now Visionary Award. In 2024, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project released a recording in honor of her eighty-fifth birthday.

Her work has also been nominated for four Grammy Awards, and the Library of Congress added a performance of her Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra to its National Recording Registry in 2023.

Significance

Zwilich has had a profound impact on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American music and has been a beacon of inspiration for aspiring female composers and young composers in general. Her success continues to breed success, and it allows her to lead her life as a composer first and foremost. At the same time, she has directed herself to make art music more accessible to American audiences. Although she was trained by such advanced composers as Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, she has discovered and cultivated a musical language that is comprehensible to large numbers of people. She once told an interviewer, “Art is not a trivial thing. It’s at the center of life. It has to do with understanding ourselves as human beings.”

Zwilich’s long list of commissions from eminent musicians and organizations is a testament to the impact she has made on both professional musicians and the public. While her earlier efforts show a linkage to such Viennese masters as Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg, her later compositions seem to meld classical, romantic, and modern traits. Her large-scale works also call to mind composers such as Dmitri Shostakovitch and Carl Nielsen. Inspiration comes to her through a thorough knowledge and command of her craft, and whatever her influences, her compositions have won a wide audience for their distinctively intuitive, emotionally expressive style.

Bibliography

Dreier, Ruth. “Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.” High Fidelity, vol. 33, 1983, p. 4.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Wada Communications, www.zwilich.com. Accessed 10 June 2024.

Griffiths, Paul. “Zwilich in F-Sharp.” The New Yorker, 15 Mar. 1993, p. 116.

Heidel, Cheryl. “Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.” Teaching Music, vol. 8, 2001, pp. 42–46.

LePage, Jane Weiner. “Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.” Women Composers, Conductors, and Musicians of the Twentieth Century: Selected Biographies. Scarecrow, 1980–1988.

Madonna, A. Z. “Boston Modern Orchestra Project Honors Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Composer and Pioneer.” The Boston Globe, 12 Apr. 2022, www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/12/arts/boston-modern-orchestra-project-honors-ellen-taaffe-zwilich-composer-pioneer. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Moor, Paul. “Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.” High Fidelity, vol. 33, 1989, pp. 16–18.

Page, Tim. “The Music of Ellen Zwilich.” The New York Times Magazine, 14 July 1985.

“The ‘Trout’ Inspires New Bluesy Quintet.” Strad, vol. 122, no. 1456, 2011, p. 12.

Thompson, Clifford. World Musicians. Wilson, 1998.

Weininger, David. “Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Concerto to Get Local Premiere.” Boston Globe, 17 Apr. 2013, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/music/2013/04/17/concerto-ellen-taaffe-zwilich-get-local-premiere-sunday/aHBdbZkVSIovJACbr84IGO/story.html. Accessed 7 June 2024.

Zwilich, Ellen Taaffe. Interview by Anthony J. Palmer. Philosophy of Music Education Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2011, pp. 80–99.