American composer John Adams has won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music for
On the Transmigration of Souls . The 25-minute work was commissioned
by the New York Philharmonic to mark the first anniversary of the destruction of
the World Trade Center in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
"I was probably no different from most Americans in not knowing how to cope with the enormous complexities suddenly thrust upon us" in the wake of that catastrophe, Adams told andante shortly before the work's premiere last September, "[yet] if you are an experienced composer, you should not have to shy away from considering the profoundly intense."
The resulting score calls for adult and children's choruses, electronic sound design and a small ensemble of strings and piano tuned a quarter-step above standard concert pitch as well as a full symphonic orchestra. For his texts, Adams selected not elegiac poetry or prose by a famous writer — he found " the lofty eloquence of poetry to be utterly wrong for this" — but rather the "incredibly plain-spoken language" of the victims' loved ones; his sources were the missing-persons signs posted all over New York City in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and from remembrances of the victims taken from the New York Times "Portraits of Grief" series.
The New York Philharmonic gave the work's world premiere a place of honor: the memorial concert on 19 September 2002, for which Souls was paired with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, was Lorin Maazel's inaugural concert as the orchestra's music director. Writing of the premiere for andante, Paul Griffiths said that Adams, "accepting what is surely the most daunting musical commission of recent times ... fulfilled his task with honesty and courtesy." Mark Swed described the work in The Los Angeles Times as "something of wonder, mystery and beauty to contemplate," and Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times wrote that "this atypical concert work asks you to put aside typical expectations ... there is real musical method to its structure, for 30 minutes passed by almost too quickly."
On receiving word of the award, Adams said in a statement to the New York Philharmonic, "Composing Souls was a serious and very humbling experience for me, and any honor that receiving the Pulitzer Prize may afford should be shared with families of those who were lost on September 11 in New York. I'll always be indebted to those New Yorkers who so generously allowed me to use their words and remembrances to create this piece."
The jurors for the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for music were David Baker, chair of the jazz department at Indiana University's School of Music; Justin Davidson, music critic for Newsday (of Long Island, New York), andante contributor and winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for criticism; and composers John Harbison, Stephen Hartke and Joseph Schwantner. Other finalists for this year's award were Steve Reich's "video opera" Three Tales and Paul Schoenfield's Camp Songs, commissioned by Seattle's Music of Remembrance, which presents an annual Holocaust memorial concert.
Two further performances of On the Transmigration of Souls are
currently scheduled: a BBC Promenade Concert with the composer conducting the
BBC Symphony on 27 July 2003 and Edo de Waart leading the Netherlands Radio
Philharmonic at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on 7 September 2003. These
concerts should be available at the time of broadcast in streaming audio on the
Web sites of BBC Radio 3 and Netherlands Radio 4,
respectively.
