Composer Paul Moravec won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Music for “Tempest Fantasy,” a composition for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. Moravec used Sibelius as his notation software to write this musical meditation on his favorite Shakespearean play, which was commissioned and premiered by Trio Solisti and clarinetist David Krakauer in May 2003 at the Morgan Library in New York City.
Moravec joins five previous Pulitzer Prize in Music honorees using Sibelius: Charles Wuorinen (1970), Joseph Schwantner (1979), Ellen Taaffe Zwillich (1983), William Bolcom (1988) and Aaron Jay Kernis (1998).
Moravec, who names the piano as his primary instrument, has composed more than 80 published orchestral, chamber, lyric and choral compositions. In addition to the Pulitzer, his numerous awards include a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a number of important commissions. His current projects include an oboe concerto, a composition for string orchestra, a piano trio and a cantata about Benjamin Franklin.
“Sibelius was recommended to me in 1998 by my publisher, Steve Culbertson of Subito Music,” states Moravec. “Ever since, I have used the program at every stage of the composition process, from a work’s inception to the printout of the final score. Sibelius enhances my musical creativity on every level, and I value the comprehensive power, range and versatility of its myriad options, especially the ease of notation input and the MIDI playback features.”
Moravec, a graduate of Harvard and Columbia universities, has taught at Harvard, Columbia, Dartmouth and Hunter College. He currently serves as the Music Department Chair at Adelphi University in Garden City, New York.
“We have been using Sibelius programs at Adelphi’s digital music studio since 2001,” notes Moravec. “Our students find it quite effective for virtually all of their musical projects and needs. The program is especially useful to a composer like myself, for whom composition is as much about revision as anything else. Sibelius is more than just composer-friendly: It’s composer-empowering.”
For more information, please go to the Sibelius Website at www.sibelius.com
or find out more about Paul Moravec on his Website, www.paulmoravec.com.
