Tag Archives: Pulitzer Prize

Fanfare for the Common Woman

“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”

Composer Jennifer HigdonMs. Alsop is Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony (and, early in her career, of Oregon’s Eugene Symphony) and she’s being quoted in this morning’s New York Times in Vivien Schweitzer’s engaging profile of composer Jennifer Higdon, the freshly minted Pulitzer Prize winner for her Violin Concerto, written for performer Hilary Hahn.

Alsop, a fan, expanded on Higdon’s music: “Her scores are ‘very strong rhythmically … with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.’ She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is ‘very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.’”

Sounds right. Almost a year ago — on May 18, 2009 — Mr. Scatter had this to say about Higdon’s music, on the occasion of an impending concert of her music by Third Angle:

As I type I’m listening to a recording that Third Angle artistic director Ron Blessinger gave me of Philadelphia composer and double Grammy winner Jennifer Higdon’s Celestial Hymns and Zaka, and I’m liking it a WHOLE lot.

It’s jangly, insouciant, nervous, brash yet somehow introspective music. It’s thoroughly American. And it’s accessible, which in this case means not dumbed down but smart and extroverted — speaking, like Gershwin and Copland and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and many others, in a voice that would actually like to be heard by an intelligent general audience. Makes me think of Bartok crossed with Charles Lloyd, maybe because of the clarinet and flute.

What’s more, from everything I’ve heard and read, Higdon’s a delightful person, exactly the sort of public ambassador that contemporary classical music (I know; that sounds like an oxymoron. Can you think of a better way to say it?) needs.

Prizes are prizes, with all of the politicking, guesswork and compromises that go along with that. But sometimes you’re glad they turn out they way they do. Cheers, Jennifer Higdon. Enjoy the Champagne.