Wayne Peterson, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, dies at 93

For 30 years, Mr. Peterson had been a composer, pianist and professor at San Francisco State University, revered by most musicians who knew his work and extremely regarded by his college students. The Pulitzer — and the following squabble — modified his life.

Another composition, Ralph Shapey’s hour-long piece for orchestra, “Concerto Fantastique,” had been the unanimous alternative of the music jury — George Perle, Roger Reynolds and Harvey Sollberger, all distinguished composers and lecturers. Perle and Reynolds had been previous Pulitzer winners.

But the Pulitzer board, which oversees all Pulitzer prizes and has historically consisted principally of newspaper editors or publishers with an occasional creator or scholar, overruled the jury and voted to offer the prize to Mr. Peterson.

It was not the primary time that the Pulitzer board had rejected distinguished work for causes of its personal. For the drama prize, Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was dismissed in 1963 as insufficiently “uplifting,” whereas Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” (one other unanimous alternative) was ruled too “overwritten,” “confusing” and “obscene” in 1974.

But 1992 was believed to be the primary time within the historical past of the music prize that the jury’s alternative was not accepted, and the three composers on the jury went public with their displeasure.

“The Peterson is a wonderful piece and almost any other year, it would have been our first choice,” Perle, the chair of the jury, mentioned at the time. “But the Pulitzer Prize board is not professionally qualified to reverse our decision.”

Shapey, identified for the fury, depth and sustained dissonance of his music, troublesome for gamers and listeners alike, weighed in. “I’ve been up for a Pulitzer year after year and I can’t get a Pulitzer,” he mentioned. “Now the jury unanimously decided that I was going to get a Pulitzer. And I did not get a Pulitzer.”

All of which left Mr. Peterson in a troublesome spot. “I had sent the work in as a lark,” he instructed the New York Times, “and I didn’t think I had even a remote chance of winning.”

He went as far as to say that he himself would have voted for the Shapey piece had he been on the jury. But he accepted the prize.

Mr. Peterson’s award has stood the take a look at of time. Writing within the Wall Street Journal in 2017 after a Boston efficiency of “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,” critic Allan Kozinn known as it a “rewarding work, built of quickly shifting, angular figures that bristle with tension and are punctuated by high-energy, sometimes brutal chordal bursts. … This is intensely kinetic music.”

Wayne Turner Peterson was born in Albert Lea, Minn., on Sept. 3, 1927. At 7, he was bedridden for months with scarlet fever, which impressed a lifelong love for studying.

During what Mr. Peterson would later recall as an sad childhood, he studied piano and took a specific curiosity in jazz. By his late teenagers, he was touring with an enormous band and one may typically hear the influences of bebop on his later music.

Awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in 1952, he studied in England at the Royal Academy of Music, the place he labored with the composers Lennox Berkeley and Howard Ferguson. He taught at what grew to become San Francisco State University from 1960 to 1991 and was a visitor professor of composition at Stanford University from 1992 to 1994.

In all, Mr. Peterson wrote greater than 80 works for orchestra, refrain and chamber ensembles. His awards included fellowships and commissions from the Guggenheim, Koussevitzky and Fromm foundations in addition to an award of distinction from the (*93*) Academy of Arts and Letters.

The 1992 prize and the ensuing controversy modified the best way the Pulitzer board judged music. It had lengthy been the follow for the jury to call three potential candidates with one singled out because the winner. But the 1992 jury determined that it will current the Shapey work and refused to again down when requested to comply with the long-standing Pulitzer guidelines.

When instructed that there can be no award for music that 12 months if the jury didn’t present at least another work, Mr. Peterson’s piece was submitted. At one level within the jury’s deliberations, it had reportedly been the primary alternative. But the jury emphasised that it was recommending Shapey’s work as the only real winner, with Mr. Peterson’s because the runner-up. The board then voted to award the prize to Mr. Peterson.

Answering the jury’s protest in 1992, Walter Rugaber, then the writer of the Roanoke Times and a member of the Pulitzer music subcommittee, made a counter-argument to the Times that “the Pulitzers are enhanced by having, in addition to the professional’s point of view, the layman’s or consumer’s point of view.”

“These are works that are performed in concert halls, and which thousands of people hear,” Rugaber added. “And I think it is not inappropriate for people who are not professional musicians, composers or performers to listen to the best that the professionals recommend, and to express an opinion that one is more interesting than the other.”

The Pulitzer Prize for music had lengthy been thought of problematic and hidebound. Its 1974 laureate, Donald Martino, summed it up thusly: “If you write music long enough, sooner or later someone is going to take pity on you and give you the damn thing.”

Among the (*93*) composers who didn’t win the prize, which was established in 1943, had been Duke Ellington, John Cage, Morton Gould, George Rochberg, Leonard Bernstein and, because it turned out, Shapey. No feminine composer gained till 1983 (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich for her Symphony No. 1) and never till 1997 was jazz or pop music admitted into the Pulitzer pantheon, when Wynton Marsalis won for “Blood on the Fields.” In 2018, Kendrick Lamar’s album “DAMN.” grew to become the primary hip-hop work to be so honored.

After 1992, the dimensions of the Pulitzer jury was elevated. Jurors had been not permitted to choose a best choice however had been required to submit the candidates in alphabetical order, with no trace of a choice.

Mr. Peterson’s marriage to Harriet Christensen led to divorce. His companion of 42 years, Ruth Knier, predeceased him in dying by seven weeks.

Survivors embrace 4 sons from his marriage, Alan Peterson and Drew Peterson, each of Greenbrae, Calif., Craig Peterson of San Rafael, Calif., and Grant Peterson of Chico, Calif.; and two grandchildren.