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Miami Herald Ellen 4-26-09 Taaffe Zwilich, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in music, turns 70 on Thursday, and while the milestone is significant, most people would find it difficult to believe.

With her unfailing good cheer and prolific musical output, Zwilich remains a strikingly youthful presence.

And, while the birthday of the home-town composer — Zwilich was born in Miami and is a seasonal resident of Pompano Beach — has been overlooked by South Florida’s musical institutions, it is being celebrated in appropriate style elsewhere.

Zwilich’s Fifth Symphony premiered at Carnegie Hall last October under the baton of James Conlon. Several new recordings of her music have either been released or are in the pipeline.
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Zwilich (pronounced SWILL-ik) has been remarkably prolific. She has written in all genres except opera and has created an extensive body of work, averaging more than one new composition a year since she ”started counting” in 1971.

Her music covers a dizzying range and draws on an array of offbeat instrumentation, encompassing everything from a Fantasy for solo harpsichord to her 2007 Quintet for Alto Saxophone and String Quartet.

Her output includes five symphonies — her First won the Pulitzer in 1983 — choral music, a song cycle and ballet, several chamber works and many concertos, including works for such unlikely solo protagonists as bass trombone and Rituals, for five percussionists and orchestra.

Not many living classical composers were referenced in the Peanuts cartoon strip, a serendipity that led to a friendship with the late Charles Schulz and, eventually, the creation of Zwilich’s charming Peanuts Gallery for children’s concerts, a work documented in a PBS special. (Zwilich, married for 16 years to Erik LaMont, has no children.)
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”I think it’s become more open and more free,” she says. There’s always these little elements of surprise. One is always evolving. But I don’t think anybody writes music to exemplify a particular style. It’s just a basic human need that arises in some people to write music.
`That’s the interesting thing about it. [Composing] isn’t a craft that you learn and then you’ve mastered that, and you do it. You’re always learning new things.”

Zwilich’s music is concise and never outstays its welcome — her Symphony No. 1 spans less than 20 minutes. She loves unusual instrumentation — vibraphone, tuba, bass clarinet, bells — yet such experimentation never seems like mere dabbling for effect but rather weaves through the musical architecture and flow.

”I’m always interested in overall form and the line of a piece,” Zwilich says. “The formal evolution is very important to me. And having something come together and have an expressive component is what I feel really good about.”

That unity is always evident in her music, along with an individualized orchestration and palette of colors. Yet Zwilich’s music is never lightweight or trivial. Indeed, its dynamism and rhythmic insistence reflect the tenacity and toughness beneath its composer’s amiability.
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Though Zwilich would like to be optimistic about the future of music in South Florida, she worries about the lack of staying power of local musical institutions such as newly interred Concert Association of Florida or the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, which, under James Judd, frequently championed her music.

”The sad thing that I’ve seen over the years is that the roots are not deep,” Zwilich says. “Many an organization has come to a demise because one person died or left.”

With so much music in so many genres, the composer declines to pick favorite compositions but says she is most satisfied with her most recent efforts, the Fifth Symphony and Septet.

”I think those are two of my strongest pieces,” says Zwilich, still awed at the compositional process. ”It’s something that comes out of your entire being,” she says. “I think that’s the most wonderful thing. And that’s why, at my age, I still feel like a kid in a candy shop, that I’m able to do this.”

Read the whole article at the Miami Heraldhttp://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/music/story/1016257.html