Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: Time after Time in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and Arches in 2011.
Mario Davidovsky is an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the US, where he lives today. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Tristan Murail is a French composer associated with the "spectral" technique of composition.
Melinda Jane Wagner is a US composer, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Her undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She received her graduates degrees from University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the ‘Bravo!’ Vail Valley Music Festival. Some of her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise.
Joseph Clyde Schwantner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer, educator and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002. He was awarded the 1970 Charles Ives Prize.
Chen Yi is a Chinese violinist and composer of contemporary classical music. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Chen was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Si Ji, and has received awards from the Koussevistky Music Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School and in 2012, she was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association.
Donald James Martino was a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer.
Wayne Peterson is an American Pulitzer Prize–winning composer, pianist and educator.
Matthew John Hindson AM is an Australian composer.
Donald Henry Kay AM is an Australian classical composer.
Gary Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002. He currently teaches on the music faculty at the University of Toronto.
Israel Sharon is an Israeli composer, pianist, arranger and conductor.
Ruth Shaw Wylie was a U.S.-born composer and music educator. She described herself as “a fairly typical Midwestern composer,” pursuing musical and aesthetic excellence but not attracting much national attention: “All good and worthy creative acts do not take place in New York City,” she wrote in 1962, “although most good and worthy rewards for creative acts do emanate from there; and if we can’t all be on hand to reap these enticing rewards we can take solace in the fact that we are performing good deeds elsewhere.” She was among the many twentieth-century American composers whose work contributed to the recognition of American “serious” music as a distinct genre.
Gordon Fitzell is a composer, concert organizer, and professor of music. His catalog consists of solo, chamber and electroacoustic music, including open and improvisatory works.
Gideon Gee-Bum Kim is a Korean-Canadian classical music composer, conductor, and music educator and founder of the Toronto Messiaen Ensemble. His music draws on his Christian faith and shows a connection of the rich musical heritage of Korea and new compositional techniques, especially in the field of heterophony texture and all of this with live and emotional imagination.
