APRIL-MAY 2000

ZWILICH

EPPES SUPERPROFESSOR IN MUSIC

By Marcia Welch
Special to the Florida State Times

The call came one evening in 1983 while she was in her study working. The man calling first confirmed that she was the noted composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Then he asked her questions.

"What's this all about?" Zwilich asked. Her caller was an Associated Press reporter. "You probably don't know this, but you've just won the Pulitzer..."
"I tried to give a dignified interview while popping out of my skin!" Zwilich recalled recently.

"While talking to him I was asking myself if I knew anyone mean enough to play such a trick."

Zwilich received official notice of the prize the next day, becoming the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in music - yet another first in her accomplished career.

One of the world's foremost composers, Zwilich received her undergraduate and graduate degrees in music from Florida State in 1960 and 1962. Now, after 35 years working solely as a musician, Zwilich has returned to FSU to teach.

"I believe if we don't educate young minds, we've lost everything," said Zwilich, 60.. "FSU's music department has always been a special place to me. I bring certain things to the table as someone who has been in the professional world."

"Ellen epitomizes the complete musician," said Jon R. Piersol, dean of FSU's School of Music. "In these days of increasing specialization, it is gratifying to be able to hold up an example of such musical comprehensiveness."

FSU can be credited for helping to make Zwilich the total musician that she is. In part, that is because she wore the hats of both performer and composer while a student at the university. But there is another reason.
To her, FSU's School of Music excels at creating an atmosphere where musicologists converse with composers who converse with performers. "A student needs to exist as a performer, composer or musicologist, but within the total world."

Years ago, the student Zwilich was first a music education major and then a composition major at FSU. She played trumpet with the Marching Chiefs and the Jazz Band, sang early music with the Collegium Musicum ensemble and played violin in the symphony.

The woman who says her life's successes are the result of merely "putting one foot in front of the other" has amassed an impressive list of firsts and awards - while piecing together a striking career.

After graduating from FSU, she moved to New York City, where she later joined the American Symphony Orchestra. In 1975, she was the first woman to receive a doctorate in composition from the Juilliard School in New York City. That year, the Juilliard Orchestra performed her Symposium for Orchestra, an event that began to turn heads in the music world.

To Zwilich, her many prestigious awards are just "desserts or appetizers."
"For me the real prize is hearing wonderful, gifted performers play my work," Zwilich said.

In 1995, Zwilich was the first person appointed to the Carnegie Hall Composer's Chair.

"Ellen to us is a superior composer, a brilliant thinker, and compassionate. ... She puts ideas and visions into context," said Kristin Lancino, director of artistic planning at Carnegie Hall.

A prolific composer, Zwilich says her drive to create music has only grown more intense as she's gotten older. "I feel strongly that if I don't have goose bumps about the next piece then it's not worth doing," she said. She added that her work is a "strange mixture of fear and pleasure. But it sure is a lot of fun."

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