Widely considered to be one of America’s leading composers, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich was born in Miami, Florida in 1939. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in composition from the Florida State University in 1960 and 1962 respectively. She earned a doctorate in composition from The Juilliard School and holds an honorary doctorate from Oberlin College.
Zwilich is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnanyi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous Grammy nominations, and, among other distinctions, she has been elected to the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, she was named to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall.
A prolific composer in all media except opera, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s works have been performed by virtually all of the leading American orchestras and by major ensembles abroad. She has written orchestral works on commission from the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Long Beach, Indianapolis, and Pittsburgh Symphonies, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, among others. Her list of commissioned works for chamber groups is equally impressive. Many of her works have been issued on recordings, and Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians [8th edition] states: “There are not many composers in the modern world who possess the lucky combination of writing music of substance and at the same time exercising an immediate appeal to mixed audiences. Zwilich offers this happy combination of purely technical excellence and a distinct power of communication.”