Skip to main content
The 2024 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).

Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), by 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.

Tyshawn Sorey accepts the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music from Columbia University Interim President Katrina Armstrong. (David Dini/The Pulitzer Prizes)

Winning Work

Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith)

By

Tyshawn Sorey

ADAGIO (FOR WADADA LEO SMITH) is ostensibly a concerto for saxophone and orchestra, but in many ways, it is an anti-concerto. Concertos are usually showcases for dazzling displays of virtuosic technique. This work requires a great deal of technique, but of a much more subtle variety.  Instead of rapid-fire outbursts of sixteenth or thirty- second notes the soloist and orchestra are asked to play at the glacial tempo of thirty-six quarter notes per minute. The dynamics are extremely quiet. It is more about introversion than extroversion. The players and the listeners need to settle in for twenty minutes as the work unfolds slowly and quietly with beautiful, sustained harmonies and only slightly less sustained melodies introduced via the orchestra or intermittently by the saxophone soloist. This stately but understated work is a welcome respite from the chaos and intrusiveness of modern life.

ADAGIO (FOR WADADA LEO SMITH) was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. It received its world premiere in Lucerne on August 20, 2022 and its US premiere in Atlanta on March 16, 2023. The soloist for both performances was Timothy McAllister. The US premiere was part of New Music USA’s Amplifying Voices program.

Mr. Sorey has written a series of pieces dedicated to various teachers, mentors and colleagues that he has associated with throughout his studies and subsequently in his career. This piece is dedicated to the trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, with whom he has performed and recorded.

-- from the G. Schirmer/AMP-sponsored entry questionnaire

As of May 6, 2024, an archival, unpublished recording of the work's 2022 Lucerne premiere is available here.

Biography

Newark-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey is a composer and musician who occupies a unique space in and between spontaneous and formal composition. An artist whose work has proven impossible to categorize, he has maintained a lifelong interest in establishing an alternative musical model that celebrates genre mobility both as an artistic ideal and a compositional attitude.

Over the last several years, Sorey’s major orchestral works have included For George Lewis (Alarm Will Sound); For Roscoe Mitchell (premiered by the Seattle Symphony with Seth Parker Woods); For Marcos Balter (premiered by Detroit Symphony and the New Jersey Symphony with Jennifer Koh); and For Olly Wilson (premiered by San Francisco Contemporary Music Players and Ensemble Intercontemporain). He created song cycles for Opera Philadelphia with John Holiday and Los Angeles Opera with Amanda Lynn Bottoms and filmmaker Nadia Hallgren. Honoring his recent work, The New York Times deemed him “the composer of the year” for 2020. With director Peter Sellars, soprano Julia Bullock, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, Sorey composed Perle Noire: Meditations for Josephine, which has been staged by Ojai Festival, DACAMERA, and Metropolitan Museum of Art (on the grand staircase in the entry hall). The piece will travel to the Dutch National Opera and Theatre du Chatelet in 2023. In addition, he has written works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, PRISM Quartet, cellist Matt Haimovitz, The Crossing, JACK Quartet, TAK Ensemble, the McGill-McHale Trio, bass-baritone Davóne Tines, the Louisville Orchestra, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee with Opera Philadelphia in partnership with Carnegie Hall.

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Music in 2024:

Felipe Lara

Premiered on March 23, 2023 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, a reimagining of the traditional concerto, with improvisation, vocalization, and Afro-Brazilian elements that forge compelling, intimate relationships between the orchestra and two soloists.

Mary Kouyoumdjian

Premiered at EMPAC (Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), Troy, N.Y. on February 25, 2023, a socially urgent multi-media work that boldly melds music and audio documentary with first-person stories of refugees, exploring how music serves as solace and inspiration under conditions of displacement.

The Jury

George E. Lewis(Chair)

Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music, Columbia University

Susan Feder

Trustee, The Amphion Foundation, Irvington, N.Y.

Josh Kun

Vice Provost for the Arts; Professor and Chair in Cross-Cultural Communication, University of Southern California

Tania León*

Composer, Conductor and Educator, Nyack, N.Y.

Nicole M. Mitchell

Flutist, Composer and Professor of Music, University of Virginia

Winners in Music

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.
2020

Anthony Davis

Premiered on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera, a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful. Libretto by Richard Wesley.
See All Music

2024 Prize Winners

National Reporting

Staff of Reuters

For an eye-opening series of accountability stories focused on Elon Musk’s automobile and aerospace businesses, stories that displayed remarkable breadth and depth and provoked official probes of his companies’ practices in Europe and the United States.
See All 2024 Winners