William Robin

“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 <a id="d7544808-8445-31fa-a9b2-5a74760d3c2b" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/music/kendrick-lamar-pulitzer-prize-music.html">The New York Times</a>.

A year after Kendrick Lamar, will the Music Pulitzer embrace pop?

A year ago, shock waves rippled through the arts world when the Pulitzer Prize in Music, almost always bestowed on a classical composer, was awarded to Kendrick Lamar’s album “DAMN.”

<h1>In May, musician Matt Marks died suddenly, of heart failure, after a performance with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound.</h1>

It was a blow to the tight-knit world of contemporary music, in which the 38-year-old Marks was a prominent presence as a composer, vocalist and French horn player. Along with his prolific compositional output, he helped found Alarm Will Sound, as well as the New Music Gathering conference, and he was a provocatively humorous mainstay on social media.

This community rallied to memorialize him. Alarm Will Sound started the Matt Marks Impact Fund to develop new works. Several of his close friends completed his score for a theatrical piece, “Words on the Street,” which had its debut in October. And Tuesday at Roulette in Brooklyn, the Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now festival — which presented Marks’ opera “Mata Hari” in 2017 and runs through Jan. 13 — will revive his breakthrough 2010 work, “The Little Death: Vol. 1.”

Marks’ fiancée, composer Mary Kouyoumdjian, has become the de facto steward of his musical legacy. “I don’t want him or his music to be forgotten,” she said in a recent interview. They had been close artistic collaborators, sharing drafts and producing each other’s recording sessions.

“He was such a strong advocate for my own music and getting it out there,” she added, “that this is the smallest way for me to return the favor.”

Much of Marks’ music draws together a permissive polystylism with a comedic irreverence toward the ritual trappings of classical music. In a 2016 recording he posted on SoundCloud, he dramatically — and hilariously — recited pianist Khatia Buniatishvili’s hagiographic website biography atop the majestic theme from “Jurassic Park.”

But his death has also brought into stark relief the intense intimacy that is the basis of several of his works, which were conceived during — and are partly about — personal relationships, and which now have a new emotional rawness. This is particularly apparent in the coming production of “The Little Death,” which Marks originally created in close collaboration with soprano Mellissa Hughes while they were dating, and which has not been performed since they broke up in 2012.

“I viscerally got sick,” Hughes recalled in an interview about being asked to revive the work at Prototype. “I couldn’t think about doing it, and it just felt wrong.”

In 2006, as young New York-based classical music freelance artists, Marks and Hughes met on a bizarre gig: a PBS crossover special being filmed in Miami, in which their live performance was replaced by canned audio. They reconnected on Myspace, where Marks had posted some simple songs he had written.

As they began dating, Marks’ compositions became more serious, and he increasingly wrote specifically for Hughes’ voice, culminating in “The Little Death.” Starring Marks and Hughes and billed as a “post-Christian nihilist pop opera,” it presented a love story of religious and sexual awakenings reinforced by Marks’ intricately wrought, omnivorous score: One exuberant duet combines electropop and the shape-note hymn “Wondrous Love.”

A series of grandiosely cheeky performances in various spaces in New York, and a recording released on New Amsterdam Records in 2010, were heralded for embodying an emergent genre-crossing scene widely known as “indie classical” or “alt-classical.”

Marks and Hughes worked on Vol. 2, but the project ended with their relationship. “I haven’t even sung through any of it or even really hummed through it since 2012,” Hughes said. “When you create something like that with somebody, it becomes a part of you, and so when you’re no longer with that person, it’s hard to revisit.”

Electronic samples on the album, and passages in Marks’ libretto, memorialize inside jokes and moments in their real-life romance. “When I hear these things, it’s hard to remember,” Hughes said. “It’s like an audio graveyard.”

“But it’s also beautiful,” she added. “It was a time in both of our lives that we were so creative, and we were young and poor and nobody knew us, and so we didn’t care. We wrote what we wrote.”

That sincerity was a through line in Marks’ music and motivated his exhaustive engagement with musical genres that might be looked down on by other composers. “One of the things that I respect about Christian music and Christian pop music is that they’re willing to get sentimental,” he told The Brooklyn Rail in 2010. “I think you can actually mess with people’s heads way more by going the sentimental route, playing with their heartstrings.” Since his death, moments on the “Little Death” album that might have once sounded arch — hokey chord progressions, campy melodic hooks — can unexpectedly arouse tears.

And at the core of Marks’ compositional voice was his actual voice: a shape-shifting but always identifiable timbre that traversed a range as broad as his musical influences, whether the guttural bellows of his bonkers cover of the novelty song “Donde Esta Santa Claus” or the sickly sweet falsetto deployed to embody a Karen Carpenter-obsessed, disaffected teenager in “A Song for Wade (This is not that song).” With his death, that irreplaceable component of much of his music is gone.

“So many of the pieces that he wrote for himself to sing, it would not work without him,” said composer Ted Hearne. Hearne sang in a “praise choir” assembled to accompany an early run of “The Little Death” and will take on Marks’ part for the Prototype revival. Since the piece lacks a fully notated score, Hearne is learning the music primarily by listening closely to the album.

“I have to be able to perform it with as much confidence and moxie and guts as he would,” he said. He helped persuade Hughes to sing, telling her, she recalled, “If you don’t do it, the piece dies with Matt.”

“The Little Death” was Kouyoumdjian’s first introduction to Marks’ music. She was so captivated by a 2010 performance that, as she was leaving the concert, she walked into a glass door and broke her nose. She and Marks met a couple years later to discuss a potential collaboration with her ensemble, Hotel Elefant, and began dating. (That project was recorded before Marks’ death and will be part of a future release of his music on New Amsterdam.)

Marks was a longtime resident of Brooklyn, and he and Kouyoumdjian would often visit unfamiliar parts of the borough. One such excursion involved a bus trip — during which they shared a pair of headphones to listen to Mariah Carey — to the serene Salt Marsh Nature Center in Marine Park. Not long afterward, Marks began a new project, the pop monodrama “Headphone Splitter,” which takes a lightly fictionalized account of their date as its point of departure: The characters Matt and Baby cozily split headphones on the B41 to go bird-watching on a lazy Saturday and witness a brutal ax murder.

“Having this sixth sense of twisting everything sweet into something really dark, he thought, ‘Oh, this would be the perfect beginning for this murder mystery,'” Kouyoumdjian said. With director Nick Leavens, “Headphone Splitter” was to be developed into a series of music videos driven by Marks’ singing, although he only recorded the first three episodes.

In Chapter 1, atop swirlingly catchy electronics, Marks narrates the bus adventure with his characteristically zany swagger — “Baby, go on, pull out your headphone splitter. Sit close, we’ll listen to the soundtrack of ‘Glitter'” — followed by the sudden homicide. “It has so many elements of things Matt that loved so much,” Kouyoumdjian said: Brooklyn, low-budget horror films, macabre humor.

“The music that he was writing more recently goes back to the music he was writing for ‘The Little Death,'” Kouyoumdjian added, “projects like ‘Headphone Splitter’ that really celebrated him as a composer-performer, and were projects that he could do on his own. He could write his own text, which was something he loved; he could direct the idea and the vision of the project; and he could just sit at his computer and write and produce.”

She is planning to release the two other episodes Marks completed, and she may finish some of the rest of the series herself, although a crowdfunding campaign to support the project did not meet its goal. While Kouyoumdjian has been active as a composer — she has collaborated with the Kronos Quartet and is preparing a commission for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth — she has lately focused more on tending Marks’ body of work.

“It’s a lot easier for me to put energy toward his projects happening, at this point, than for my own,” she said. “Composition is really tricky. It really requires a lot of emotional vulnerability, and I think that that’s a space that’s difficult to be in for long periods of time after you lose somebody.”

“Helping Matt’s music be a little more public,” she added, “is my way of still doing creative work, but in a way that feels right to me, right now.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="67f28faa-e55c-4fad-ac25-97ca12b65ebe" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/arts/music/matt-marks-little-death-prototype-festival.html">The New York Times</a>.

Stewards Nourish a Young Composer's Legacy

This community rallied to memorialize him. Alarm Will Sound started the Matt Marks Impact Fund to develop new works.

Stewards nourish a young composer's legacy

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A year after Kendrick Lamar, will the Music Pulitzer embrace pop?

Stewards nourish a young composer's legacy