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A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir.
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States citizen on August 27, 1943.
The Pulitzer Prize for Music is one of seven Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually in Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first given in 1943. Joseph Pulitzer arranged for a music scholarship to be awarded each year, and this was eventually converted into a prize: "For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year."
Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of real passion".
Catulli Carmina is a cantata by Carl Orff dating from 1940–1943. He described it as ludi scaenici. The work mostly sets poems of the Latin poet Catullus to music, with some text by the composer. Catulli Carmina is part of Trionfi, the musical trilogy that also includes the Carmina Burana and Trionfo di Afrodite. It is scored for a full mixed choir, soprano and tenor soloists, and an entirely percussive orchestra – possibly inspired by Stravinsky's Les noces – consisting of four pianos, timpani, bass drum, 3 tambourines, triangle, castanets, maracas, suspended and crash cymbals, antique cymbal, tam-tam, lithophone, metallophone, 2 glockenspiels, wood block, xylophone, and tenor xylophone.
William Howard Schuman was an American composer and arts administrator.
Robert Eugene Ward was an American composer who is best remembered for his opera The Crucible (1961) after the 1953 play of the same name by Arthur Miller. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for that opera in 1962.
Norman Dello Joio was an American composer active for over half a century. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957.
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is a long poem written by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as an elegy to President Abraham Lincoln. It was written in the summer of 1865 during a period of profound national mourning in the aftermath of the president's assassination on 14 April of that year.
Donald James Martino was a Pulitzer Prize winning American composer.
Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr. was an American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Rejoice in the Lamb is a cantata for four soloists, SATB choir and organ composed by Benjamin Britten in 1943 and uses text from the poem Jubilate Agno by Christopher Smart (1722–1771). The poem, written while Smart was in an asylum, depicts idiosyncratic praise and worship of God by different things including animals, letters of the alphabet and musical instruments. Britten was introduced to the poem by W. H. Auden whilst visiting the United States, selecting 48 lines of the poem to set to music with the assistance of Edward Sackville-West. The cantata was commissioned by the Reverend Walter Hussey for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew's Church, Northampton. Critics praised the work for its uniqueness and creative handling of the text. Rejoice in the Lamb has been arranged for chorus, solos and orchestral accompaniment, and for SSAA choir and organ.
Dona nobis pacem is a cantata written by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1936 and first performed on 2 October of that year. The work was commissioned to mark the centenary of the Huddersfield Choral Society. Vaughan Williams produced his plea for peace by referring to recent wars during the growing fears of a new one. His texts were taken from the Mass, three poems by Walt Whitman, a political speech, and sections of the Bible. A.V. Butcher has analysed Vaughan Williams' use of the Whitman poems in this composition.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1943.
Katherine Kennicott Davis was an American composer, pianist, arranger, and teacher, whose most well-known composition is the Christmas song "Carol of the Drum," later known as "The Little Drummer Boy".
Lilacs for voice and orchestra is a musical composition by George T. Walker Jr. (1922–2018) that was awarded the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Music. The work, scored for soprano soloist and orchestra, was the unanimous choice of the Pulitzer prize jury. Walker was the first African-American composer to be awarded the prize.
Charles Clement Fussell is an American composer and conductor of contemporary classical music. He has composed six symphonies and three operas. His symphony Wilde for solo baritone and orchestra, based on the life of Oscar Wilde and premiered by the Newton Symphony Orchestra and the baritone Sanford Sylvan in 1990, was a finalist for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Music. He received a citation and award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1992.
Rossini Waugh Stewart Vrionides was an American actress, composer, organist and violinist. She performed in vaudeville and on stage under the name "Gypsy Rossini."
References
- ↑ "Music", Pulitzer.org. Retrieved December 3, 2013.
- ↑ Swayne, Steve (2011). Orpheus in Manhattan: William Schuman and the Shaping of America's Musical Life, p.139. ISBN 9780199793105.
- 1 2 Heinz-Dietrich Fischer, Erika J. Fischer (2001). Musical Composition Awards 1943-1999: From Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber to Gian-Carlo Menotti and Melinda Wagner, p.3-4. ISBN 9783110955750.
- ↑ "William Schuman - A Free Song, Secular Cantata No. 2 (1942)", Music Sales Classical.
- ↑ Green, Jonathan D. (2003). A Conductor's Guide to Choral-orchestral Works, Part 1, p.206. ISBN 9780810847200.
- 1 2 Oteri, Frank J. (August 16, 2011). "Sounds Heard: William Schuman—A Free Song, Finally!", NewMusicBox.org.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Fauser, Annegret (2013). Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II, p.238. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199323760.
- 1 2 Swayne (2011), p.137.
- 1 2 Wannamaker, John Samuel (1972). "The Musical Settings of the Poetry of Walt Whitman: A Study of Theme, Structure, and Prosody", Ph.D. diss. University of Minnesota. Cited in Swayne (2011), p.137.
- ↑ Swayne (2011), p.197.
- ↑ Swayne (2011), p.520.
