Hearing the Pulitzers: A piece-by-piece, episode-by-episode exploration of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize in Music with hosts Andrew Granade and David Thurmaier.
Episodes
Saturday Jul 12, 2025
Saturday Jul 12, 2025
In this episode, Dave and Andrew go back to the events of 9/11 and listen to a piece memorializing the day. But will they find the piece moving or maudlin? And how does the piece hold up some 20+ years later? By this point, John Adams was a famous composer, but should this particular piece of his have won the prize?
If you'd like more information about John Adams, we recommend:
- His memoir Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (you can read an excerpt at NPR).
- Dan Blim's article referenced in the show, "Disunity and the Commemoration of 9/11 in John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls" Journal of the Society for American Music, 7, no. 4 (November 2013): 382-420.
- Kalle Puolakka's article "Public Art and Dewey’s Democratic Experience: The Case of John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls" The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74, No. 4 (2016): 371-81.
10 months ago
Thank you for these programs. I wish that John Adams, one of my favorite composers [“City Noir” (!) the Saxophone Concerto (!)] had not written this piece. I’m usually not drawn to programmatic musical works meant to commemorate specific tragedies or horrors. For example, there are works by Martinu, Husa, Shostakovich, Penderecki, William Schuman , which also have devastating reference points. There is some greatness in those works, but I would rather evaluate the music abstractly. By the way, as a New Yorker who was quite present here on that day, I have particularly avoided the John Adams 9/11 piece and also the one by Steve Reich.