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The 2025 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Music
For distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year, Fifteen thousand dollars ($15,000).

Sky Islands, by Susie Ibarra

Premiered on July 18, 2024 at the Asia Society, New York, N.Y., a work about ecosystems and biodiversity, that challenges the notion of the compositional voice by interweaving the profound musicianship and improvisational skills of a soloist as a creative tool.

Susie Ibarra accepts the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Music. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

Sky Islands

By

Susie Ibarra

Work in progress excerpt. (Asia Society)

Join us for the world premiere of Filipinx composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra's Sky Islands, a musical tribute to our rich and fragile ecosystems inspired by the distinct rainforest habitats of Luzon, Philippines. The piece is composed for Ibarra’s eight-piece music ensemble, including the Extended Filipino Talking Gong Ensemble with Claire Chase on flute, Alex Peh on piano, and Levy Lorenzo and Ibarra on percussion, joined by the four-member Bergamot Quartet comprising violinists Ledah Finck and Sarah Thomas, violist Amy Huimei Tan and cellist Irène Han. The piece features the interlocking rhythms and melodies of Philippine Northern style bamboo, gong, and flute music, performed on new sound sculptures of gong metals titled Floating Gardens. Sky Islands is commissioned by Asia Society, with support from Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, NYSCA, and NYFA Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Artists Grants.

Sky Islands is a musical call to action, drawing awareness to dwindling biodiversity, changing climate and global community practices. This program is part of the COAL + ICE exhibition and series of programs at Asia Society, Feb. 13-Aug. 11, 2024, designed to provoke thought and action on climate change.

-- from the Asia Society performance page

Biography

Susie Ibarra is a Filipinx composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary. Among her many projects, she is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and, with artist-musician and engineer Jake Landau, the label and publisher Habitat Sounds. She works to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, like musika katutubo from the Philippines, advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and supports initiatives in addressing water and desert climate, and women and girls education with Joudour Sahara, Morocco. Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. Several recent albums of her music and her collaborations include Talking Gong, Walking on Water, Insectum with Graham Reynolds and Jeffrey Zeigler, Heart and Breath Rhythm and Tone Fields with Richard Reed Parry and upcoming EP Parallels and Confluences: Bugang and Pasig Rivers with Arneis String Quartet and Alex Peh. She has performed in events and venues such as Carnegie Hall; the Olympics; and the Sharjah Biennial. Ibarra writes about her practice focused on the ecology of rhythm in the environment in her 2024 book release, Rhythm in Nature. Recent honors include a 2024 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, for which she is based in Berlin, and 2024 Charles Ives Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2022 Music Fellow, United States Artists 2019 Music Fellow, TED Senior Fellow 2014, and NatGeo Explorers Storyteller 2020. Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Zildjian, and Vic Firth Drum Artist.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Music in 2025:

George Lewis

Premiered on June 14, 2024 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an ingenious pairing of works by W. E. B. Du Bois and Claudio Monteverdi that moves between the social corruption of ancient Rome and Jim Crow America, combining elements of chromaticism and a free jazz aesthetic. Libretto by Douglas Kearney.

Jalalu-Kalvert Nelson

Premiered on February 8, 2024 at Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, N.Y., a series of musical scenes, each using a variety of techniques and textures to convey the ongoing battle against second-class citizenship for Black and Brown people and their struggle for acceptance, a challenging and meaningful work.

The Jury

Arturo O’Farrill(Chair)

Founder/Artistic Director, Afro Latin Jazz Alliance; Professor, Global Jazz Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Daphne A. Brooks

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music, Yale University

Du Yun*

Composer/Performer; Professor of Composition, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University

Guthrie Ramsey

Music Historian/Pianist/Composer; Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

John Schaefer(Host, Soundcheck, WNYC)

Winners in Music

2024

Tyshawn Sorey

Premiered on March 16, 2023 at Atlanta Symphony Hall, an introspective saxophone concerto with a wide range of textures presented in a slow tempo, a beautiful homage that’s quietly intense, treasuring intimacy rather than spectacle.
2023

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels

Premiered on May 27, 2022 at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., an innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.
2022

Raven Chacon

Premiered on November 21, 2021 in Milwaukee, Wis., a mesmerizing, original work for organ and ensemble that evokes the weight of history in a church setting, a concentrated and powerful musical expression with a haunting visceral impact.
2021

Tania León

Premiered at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City on February 13, 2020, a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.
See All Music

2025 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of The Wall Street Journal

For chronicling political and personal shifts of the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, including his turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
See All 2025 Winners