Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

The last entry to my focus for the month of March (a woman a day for Women's History Month) is Ellen Taafe Zwilich. Unless you are involved in the world of 20th Century (now 21st Century) music, you may not be familiar with Zwilich. My limited knowledge of her music began in college. My junior year I took a class on 20th Century music, where we only focused on Western European/American male composers. We only had a semester, so this is somewhat understandable. In our last project for the class, we got to choose a composer and/or work of music we hadn't gone over in class to research and discuss in class. The only female composer I could find much information about at that time was Zwilich.

She really came onto the scene in 1983 when she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She was recognized for her Symphony No. 1 (this was the work I studied). This opus is an exploration of the first fifteen bars of the first movement. I strongly recommend listening to it if you can.

"Many of her works have been issued on recordings, and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians [8th edition] states: "There are not many composers in the modern world who possess the lucky combination of writing music of substance and at the same time exercising an immediate appeal to mixed audiences. Zwilich offers this happy combination of purely technical excellence and a distinct power of communication."link

Zwilich is currently on the faculty of the School of Music at Florida State University.


- List of her works