Semester
Spring
Date of Graduation
2019
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Type
MA
College
College of Creative Arts
Department
School of Music
Committee Chair
Evan A. MacCarthy
Committee Co-Chair
Travis D. Stimeling
Committee Member
Travis D. Stimeling
Committee Member
Matthew Heap
Abstract
This thesis considers the ways in which the Pulitzer Prize for Music shapes and is shaped by music of the moment. Since 1943, the Pulitzer Prize has marked 83 pieces as “distinguished” examples of American music. The financial rewarding of winning composers and the initiation of a reciprocal transfer of prestige and political capital, the Pulitzer’s expert juries and governing body has contributed to the preservation of a perpetually-shifting status quo. By chronicling the year-to-year shifts of administrative power dynamics in prize selections, the Pulitzer Prize has mirrored the changing American musical landscape.
Drawing on methods of reception history, archival research, and sociological theory, I address recent efforts to reform the Pulitzer’s arbitration of taste. Through an examination of Pulitzer-winning pieces for voice and the prize juries who selected them, I argue that over the past decade we witness a broader and more inclusive definition of American music. A new emphasis by the Prize on global identities and themes—and the social conflicts they articulate—constitute an alteration of the Pulitzer Prize’s institutional identity and its ongoing construction of an American canon for the twenty-first century.
Recommended Citation
Kuhlman, Julia K., "Prizes, Winning, and Identity: Narrative Vocal Music of the Pulitzer Prize, 2008–2018" (2019). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 3769.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/3769