“Steven Stucky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer whose work was widely commissioned by major orchestras around the world and who earned respect as a conductor, teacher and author, died on Sunday at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.,” writes Anthony Tommasini in Tuesday’s (2/16) New York Times. “He was 66.” The cause was brain cancer, according to his wife, Kristen Frey Stucky. The composer was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his Second Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. A later work, Symphony, was jointly commissioned by that orchestra and the New York Philharmonic, which gave its New York premiere in 2012. “For all the modernist complexities of Mr. Stucky’s scores, his music was sanguine, lucid and structurally clear…. Mr. Stucky was also an exceptional orchestrator and colorist.” His 2008 oratorio August 4, 1964, exploring a pivotal day in the life of President Lyndon B. Johnson, was commissioned and premiered by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. Stucky’s 1981 book Lutoslawski and His Music won a Deems Taylor Award. Born in Kansas November 7, 1949, Stucky attended Baylor University and Cornell University, subsequently joining Cornell’s faculty and chairing its music department from 1992 to 1997. In 2014 he began teaching at the Juilliard School. Survivors include his wife, two children, and two brothers and two sisters.
Posted February 16, 2016
Photo of Steven Stucky by Hoebermann Studio
