Word: zwilich
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When the cello section of the San Francisco Symphony finished a particularly tricky passage in Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's new Symphony No. 2 during rehearsal last week, the rest of the orchestra burst into applause. What provoked the collegial accolade was a daring cadenza for ten instruments playing as one, a high-wire act that is one of the emotional peaks of Zwilich's aptly subtitled 'Cello Symphony. The musicians' reaction was not surprising: Zwilich, 46, who in 1983 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, has for some time been regarded by fellow professionals...
Until recently, few outside the music business had heard of the Miami-born composer, for Taaffe Zwilich (rhymes with safe hillock) was a woman in a field that has historically been dominated by men. But after she won the Pulitzer for her Symphony No. 1 (also known as Three Movements for Orchestra), her pieces suddenly began popping up on programs everywhere. Today Zwilich is that rarity, a composer who makes her living entirely from commissions, performance fees and royalties, without having to rely on teaching or grants to ensure a modest but adequate income...
...think of it as a compromise to write music that means something to the player and listener," says Zwilich, who lives in New York City. Indeed, although she studied at the Juilliard School with Elliott Carter and the late Roger Sessions, both masters of almost gnomic complexity, Zwilich writes in a disarmingly open style. On the page her music looks as clear as Brahms'; to the ear it sounds as bold and vigorous as Shostakovich's or Prokofiev's. But it always remains her own. Says she: "The more I am true to myself, the more accessible I seem...
...characters cut a broad path across commerce and culture; Charlie Brown and Snoopy could go from being cartoon pitchmen for cars and life insurance, their huge heads and tiny bodies stretched across blimps at golf tournaments, to being the inspiration for a "Peanuts" concerto by contemporary composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, premiering at Carnegie Hall. At the peak of Schulz's popularity, "Peanuts" captured 355 million readers, and he was earning from $30 to $40 million a year...
After intermission, Yoo prefaced the Zwilich by a brief and humorous lecture, citing passages with the aid of the orchestra. The 1984 work rang a bit shallow, however; its influences carefully trace the development of music in the first half of this century and extinguish any hope of originality...