[Dixielandjazz] Can A Jazz CD win A Pulitzer Prize?

[Stephen Barbone]

Interesting. Even a total improvisation will qualify for consideration.
No music score necessary. Note well the last paragraph. Those awarding
the prizes are from a broad based audience, not people within the
discipline. In other words, regarding something like OKOM, "The Big
Audience" not musicians or the DJML, or a group of fans at OKOM
Festivals.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone


June 1, 2004 - NY Times

CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK - By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Pulitzer Board Expands Its Musical Horizons


The governing board of the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and the arts
will announce today a broadening of the category for the award in music
that would open the door to musical theater scores, film scores and
works containing large elements of improvisation, in theory even an
improvised jam session with a jazz ensemble.

The move is sure to win plaudits in some circles, especially in
Hollywood, on Broadway and within organizations like Jazz at Lincoln
Center, while provoking criticism among more traditional composers at
many of America's universities.

The current definition of what constitutes a "distinguished musical
composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its
first performance in the United States during the year," is being
revised to reflect "a broad view of serious music," to quote the board
announcement.

The new definition opens eligibility to works that have been recorded
during the previous year. In the past, the award has typically gone to
symphonic and chamber works from the "contemporary classical tradition,"
in the words of the board, or to operas, choral works and occasionally a
jazz-inflected score like Wynton Marsalis's ambitious "Blood On The
Fields," for chorus, soloists and orchestra.

Until now all new works submitted for consideration had to include a
completely notated score as well as a live recording. With the new
definition a recording of a work that has no written-out score will be
deemed sufficient, which will certainly lend a new dimension to the
deliberations of the five-member jury that selects three finalists for
consideration by the full board. The changes are sure to please the
composer John Adams, who after receiving the award in 2003 for "On the
Transmigration of Souls," a New York Philharmonic commission written in
response to the 9/11 attacks, issued a blistering public critique of the
prize. "Among musicians that I know," Mr. Adams wrote at the time in a
widely distributed e-mail message, "the Pulitzer has over the years lost
much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature
and journalism."

Anyone perusing the list of winners, he continued, cannot help noticing
the absence of most of America's greatest musical minds, from mavericks
like John Cage, Morton Feldman and Harry Partch, to composer-performers
like Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk and Meredith Monk.
These creative spirits, he wrote, had been passed over year after year,
"often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate
number of prizes."

In a recent interview Ara Guzelimian, senior director and artistic
adviser at Carnegie Hall, who was a member of the jury for the 2004
music prize, said Mr. Adams's comments were taken by the board as "very
strong medicine." To its credit, he added, with this expansion of the
category, the board has acknowledged "that there is a larger realm of
American music than has been represented so far."

Not all composers will agree. The argument against the broadening will
be that composers working in the commercial fields of film and musical
theater already attract enormous attention and are eligible for
high-profile Tony Awards and Oscars and such. Many of the composers
often dubbed academic are deserving and accomplished creators who work
in relative obscurity and benefit hugely by the prestige of the
Pulitzer. You don't see the board opening the prizes in journalism to
television correspondents and writers for online magazines.

Still, it's hard to deny that a music prize inaugurated in 1943 that has
eluded towering figures in American music like Duke Ellington (who
received a posthumous special citation in 1999 to commemorate his
centennial), or Steve Reich, a finalist from last year, has been too
constricted in its purview.

Several musicals have won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, including
Rodgers and Hammerstein's "South Pacific," Stephen Sondheim's "Sunday in
the Park With George" and Jonathan Larson's "Rent." Musical theater
works, which involve close collaboration with directors and book
writers, are natural candidates for the drama prize. It's hard to
evaluate the music without its dramatic context. Still, I would argue
that Mr. Sondheim's score for "Sweeney Todd" was by far the most
distinguished music introduced by an American composer in 1979. And for
sheer musical inventiveness, it's hard to top the film scores of Thomas
Newman ("The Road to Perdition" and "Finding Nemo." )

The broadening of the category will have no effect, though, if the
Pulitzer board does not extend the range of jurors who select the three
finalists from the entries, which typically number about 100. For some
years the jury pool has consisted of four composers and one critic. What
have been missing are performers and concert presenters who commission
and champion living composers.

Why not put on the jury the soprano Dawn Upshaw, the pianists Peter
Serkin and Gilbert Kalish, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, a member
of the Juilliard String Quarter or, for a more genre-smashing point of
view, a member of the Kronos String Quartet? Such musicians would bring
a fresh, pragmatic perspective to the deliberations.

Mr. Guzelimian, whose position at Carnegie Hall involves searching for
and commissioning a wide range or living composers, rightly points to
his own appointment on the last panel as evidence that the Pulitzer
board is moving in that direction. He also said the board should not
have trouble finding jurors who open to a wide range of musical styles.

What he did find difficult, though, was the injunction from the board to
nominate three finalists without ranking them. "It's hard to pretend
that there is an equal reaction to three different composers," he said.
"Personally I find it difficult to be even-handed."

In all categories the full Pulitzer board selects the winner from the
three unranked finalists recommended by the specialized committees, and
this is likely to continue to cause controversy within the arts fields.
The board is mostly drawn from distinguished ranks of journalists,
editors and academics, including respected scholars like Henry Louis
Gates Jr. But board members do not profess to have particular expertise
in music (or poetry or drama for that matter).

Jay T. Harris, the board member who headed the yearlong study of the
music prize and who is the director of the Center for the Study of
Journalism and Democracy at the University of Southern California,
asserted in a recent interview that the board is "absolutely capable" of
rendering such in music. As part of the new procedure, he explained, the
jury is instructed to provide detailed descriptions of each finalist to
place the work in the larger aesthetic context of its genre. Board
members are given CD's of all three works in advance and are expected to
listen to them complete.

Still, as Mr. Harris emphasized, the Pulitzer for music, as with all the
prizes in arts and letters, is awarded by an "informed group of
Americans" relying on the judgments of experts, but is "not a prize for
people in the discipline by people in the discipline."