“This is a big moment for hip-hop music and a big moment for the Pulitzers,” Dana Canedy, the prizes’ administrator, said then.
“I never thought I’d be a part of it,” Lamar told Vanity Fair about the prize. “It’s one of those things that should have happened with hip-hop a long time ago.”
It was not only the first time the prize had gone to a hip-hop work; never before had it been given to any kind of mainstream popular music. Even as Pulitzer-winning musical styles shifted over the decades, from the Americana of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” (1945) to the fragmented atonality of Donald Martino’s “Notturno” (1974) to the joyful genre-bending of Caroline Shaw’s “Partita” (2013), the prize has remained almost exclusively the province of classical music.
But Lamar’s Pulitzer upended all that. Was “DAMN.” a fluke, or will the prize — the 2019 winner will be announced on April 15 — genuinely embrace popular music? What now counts as a “distinguished American composition”?
The music Pulitzer was established in 1943 as a celebration of homegrown art in the midst of World War II; the first winner was a briskly patriotic cantata by then neoclassicist William Schuman. For decades, the prize was mostly given to well-established composers: As Martino once said, “If you write music long enough, sooner or later someone is going to take pity on you and give you the damn thing.”
There was also long a sense that awardees largely came out of the insular academic scene. In a scathing 1991 article, critic Kyle Gann chastised the Pulitzer as a “reward for conformity and a compensation prize for ineffectuality.” After winning, in 2003, John Adams told The New York Times that, “among musicians that I know, the Pulitzer has over the years lost much of the prestige it still carries in other fields like literature and journalism.” (Adams, as well as six other Pulitzer-winning composers, declined to be interviewed for this article; Lamar was unavailable for comment.)
Recently the prize has broadened in aesthetic scope and given a career boost to young composers like Shaw, who was 30 when she won. But until Lamar, it had still barely budged outside of its old classical music limits. When, in 1965, the music jury attempted to break free of those constraints by requesting a special citation for Duke Ellington, the Pulitzer’s governing board declined the recommendation.
The prize has been haunted by that embarrassing episode, only partly rectified by special awards and citations granted posthumously to Ellington and other jazz legends like Scott Joplin and John Coltrane. A turning point came in 1997, when Wynton Marsalis won, the first time the prize recognized jazz. The guidelines subsequently eliminated an original reference to classical forms and, in 2004, dropped a requirement to provide a notated score, allowing for recording-only submissions.
There were critics. “I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” Martino said of the new openness in 2004. “Let these people win DownBeat polls,” referring to the jazz magazine. (Characteristic of the history of the prize is the contradiction that some of the composers who have complained about its insularity have also vociferously defended its boundaries.)
Such changes, though, didn’t overturn the status quo. Since Marsalis, only two other jazz composers have won: Ornette Coleman and Henry Threadgill. Even Lamar’s path to victory last year was somewhat unusual: “DAMN.” had not been officially submitted. But during a weekend of deliberations, the five-member music jury weighed the merits of some classical submissions that drew on hip-hop influences, and came to the conclusion that hip-hop itself should be under consideration.
The jury introduced “DAMN.” into the process and ultimately decided it was worthy of the prize. “We’re there all day listening, reading, discussing,” one of the 2018 jurors, jazz violinist Regina Carter, said in a recent interview. “We were all really respectful of one another and listened to each other. There was no fighting going on: We’d argue our cases, but it never got ugly.”
Canedy, who spent much of her career as a reporter and editor at The New York Times, became the Pulitzers’ administrator in 2017. She sees Lamar’s win as a step toward diversifying the submission pool. “The biggest thing we could have done to send a signal to the music industry that we’re serious about this is to award a Pulitzer to Kendrick Lamar,” she said in a recent interview. “That’s not why we did it; we did it because his work was spectacular. But if it sends a signal to the industry that we really are open to all kinds of amazing music, then that’s a good thing.”
But even if SoundCloud rappers and aspiring singer-songwriters start to submit, their work still needs to be evaluated by a jury. Pulitzer juries in the past decade have typically comprised a mix of classical and jazz musicians, critics, academics and arts administrators. Will future juries give adequate attention to nonclassical submissions — or have the knowledge to properly distinguish a work of the caliber of “DAMN.” from other hip-hop entries?
“Technically speaking, excellent music is excellent music,” Canedy said. “So I think if you can judge excellent music, you can do that across genres.”
Maybe, or maybe not. Having listened to Lamar’s music, Steve Reich, who won in 2009, said, “I don’t know enough hip-hop to separate him from other hip-hop artists.”
“To make a judgment, you have to make an informed judgment,” Reich added. “And I don’t have that. Therefore, I wouldn’t be competent to judge him.”
Composer Kevin Puts, who won in 2012, said in a recent interview, “I do a lot of judging of competitions for so-called classical music, like orchestra music. I feel I’m qualified to do that. But I wonder, if there were more genres or more styles involved, if I would really be the person to make a good decision.”
Carter expressed confidence in the diversity of the two juries on which she has served. But she also acknowledged that there were potential limitations in the early stages. “If you have jurors and no one is familiar with that genre, then I think it’s not even going to make it into that forward pile,” she said. Excellent music may be excellent music, but not all musicians have equal understanding or even respect for different traditions; consider the many online commenters who dismissed Lamar’s win, one of whom described the album as “neurologically divergent from music.”
The prize, moreover, is not actually decided by the music jurors. The jury is instructed to provide the Pulitzers’ administrative board — which includes journalists, editors and academics, but not professional musicians — with three unranked nominations. The board then decides which of the three receives the award.
“We would have been happy with whomever they had chosen to win both times,” Carter said of her juries, “because all of the composers felt really strong and their works were really intriguing.” Last year’s Pulitzer could well have gone to one of the other, more conventional finalists, composers Ted Hearne and Michael Gilbertson, rather than Lamar.
And if a future board were to be confronted with, say, an opera by Tania León, an experimental record by Nicole Mitchell, and a visual album by Beyoncé, might its members tend to select the finalist with whom they were already most familiar?
“That’s just never happened,” Canedy said. “Every finalist gets its due when it comes before the board,” she added. “They do what they do, which is download the work, listen to it, debate it, and then make a decision.”
It’s not always that simple. The Ellington controversy arose from disagreement between a jury eager to award a jazz master and a board concerned that it was violating the prize’s rules. In 1992, the music jury recommended only a single finalist: a work by composer Ralph Shapey. The board demanded the jury provide a second option and, when a piece by composer Wayne Peterson was submitted, the board chose the Peterson.
Angry jurors then released a statement describing the board’s decision as “especially alarming because it occurred without consultation and without knowledge of either our standards or rationale. Such alterations by a committee without professional musical expertise guarantees, if continued, a lamentable devaluation of this uniquely important award.”
And the Pulitzer remains singularly important — which makes its intricate rules and shifts of stylistic emphasis big news in the music world. The 2019 prize may go to a groundbreaking symphony, a confessional folk record or a transcendent mixtape. Speaking in late February, Canedy said that the music jury — which will remain anonymous until the prize is announced — had selected its three finalists.
“We had a diverse slate of entries,” she said. “We have three finalists that we’re incredibly proud of, and would be happy to see any of the three win a Pulitzer.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.