Lewis Spratlan

Lewis Spratlan, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music and the 2016 Charles Ives Opera Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was born in 1940 and passed away on February 9, 2023. Spratlan was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Composition, as well as Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Bogliasco, NEA, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and MacDowell Fellowships. He located himself solidly in the mainstream of Western music, in the tradition of chant through Ligeti and beyond. He was also much influenced by jazz and South Indian music. Spratlan wrote: “I consider myself free of any ideology beyond that contained by music itself – the laws of counterpoint, principles of movement, changes in density, register, and color. All of this provides a means to say something human, to make observations about oneself in the world and the world in oneself”.

Producing new works at a prodigious rate, his recent commissions included the opera Earthrise, commissioned by San Francisco Opera; a piano quartet, Streaming, commissioned by the Ravinia Festival; Sojourner for ten players, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress; Shadow, commissioned by cellist Matt Haimovitz; Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, a consortium commission; A Summer’s Day, commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Shining: Double Concerto for Cello and Piano, commissioned by Matt Haimovitz and Christopher O’Riley; and Common Ground, commissioned by The Crossing choir, among many others. Spratlan’s opera Life is a Dream received its world premiere by the Santa Fe Opera in 2010, under the baton of Leonard Slatkin.