{"id":718,"date":"2010-04-27T13:10:19","date_gmt":"2010-04-27T18:10:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/blog\/?p=718"},"modified":"2014-11-18T18:08:24","modified_gmt":"2014-11-18T23:08:24","slug":"despite-anxiety-and-naysayers-composer-wins-her-pulitzer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/healingmusicenterprises.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/despite-anxiety-and-naysayers-composer-wins-her-pulitzer\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer"},"content":{"rendered":"
Being a serious composer in this day and age is not easy for anyone, but despite the critics and the naysayers, this young woman prevailed!\u00a0 Article was taken from the New York Times.<\/div>\n
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER<\/div>\n
Published: April 21, 2010<\/div>\n
PHILADELPHIA \u2014 Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.<\/div>\n

\u201cStarting a piece is the worst,\u201d she said, \u201cand that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize<\/a> this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn<\/a>. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as \u201ca deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon\u2019s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. \u201cThe Singing Rooms,\u201d for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera<\/a> has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.<\/p>\n

Marin Alsop<\/a>, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra<\/a>, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon\u2019s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland<\/a> can be heard in works like \u201cBlue Cathedral,\u201d the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon\u2019s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired \u201cConcerto 4-3.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her scores are \u201cvery strong rhythmically,\u201d Ms. Alsop said, \u201cwith real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.\u201d She added that Ms. Higdon\u2019s music is \u201cvery immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure when \u2018accessible\u2019 became a dirty word,\u201d Ms. Alsop said. \u201cI\u2019m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter\u2019s living room.<\/p>\n

When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.<\/p>\n

Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,\u201d said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano<\/a>, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as \u201cexpressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is \u201cvery representative of something that\u2019s happened in American music with composers of her generation,\u201d Mr. Spano said, \u201ca palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master\u2019s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo \u201cString Poetic\u201d Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).<\/p>\n

But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.<\/p>\n

One of Ms. Higdon\u2019s biggest obstacles has been her own success. As a self-published composer she was overwhelmed with administrative tasks. So Ms. Lawson, a former event planner, now works full time dealing with score rentals, sales and shipping. The average of six to eight orders a day has spiked to a dozen since the Pulitzer announcement.<\/p>\n

Lawdon Press, the name under which Ms. Higdon\u2019s music is published, is an amalgamation of the couple\u2019s last names. \u201cI figured it was smarter for us financially for me to take over and keep the copyrights and sales than for me to keep my job and turn it over to a large publishing company,\u201d Ms. Lawson said.<\/p>\n

The split-level apartment is their publishing house with all the requisite equipment; Ms. Higdon works seven days a week in her first-floor office, which has a Steinway baby grand, a Yamaha keyboard, a computer and an enormous cactus.<\/p>\n

Ms. Higdon said she doesn\u2019t experience writer\u2019s block and composes fast: \u201cI think it\u2019s a little like working out. You get that muscle going, where you\u2019re just using it all the time. So I tend to move on to the next project pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite some days of writing anxiety and dark moods, she rarely puts down her pen. Composing \u201cis a very serious need,\u201d Ms. Higdon said. \u201cI have to express things.\u201d She added that writing \u201cBlue Cathedral\u201d in 1999 after the death of her brother, Andrew Blue Higdon, from melanoma \u201cwas the most cathartic thing I could have done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Higdon has had her share of detractors, who told her she couldn\u2019t compose because she had started so late; that a flute performance major couldn\u2019t be a composer; that she would never make a living; and that she would never get into graduate school. Some male composers grumbled to her face that her she\u2019s only been successful because she\u2019s a woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone runs into naysayers,\u201d Ms. Higdon said, \u201cbut if you love something enough and feel passionately enough, you just go on ahead, walk right round the person saying it, proceed down the road and don\u2019t look back.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Being a serious composer in this day and age is not easy for anyone, but despite the critics and the naysayers, this young woman prevailed!\u00a0 Article was taken from the New York Times. 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