Steven Stucky

Steven Edward Stucky (November 7, 1949 − February 14, 2016) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.

Steven Stucky was born in Hutchinson, Kansas.

At age 9, he moved with his family to Abilene, Texas, where, as a teenager, he studied music in the public schools and, privately, viola with Herbert Preston, conducting with Leo Scheer, and composition with Macon Sumerlin.

At Baylor University, he studied composition with Richard Willis, and conducting with Daniel Sternberg.

He studied composition with Karel Husa at Cornell,.

Stucky wrote commissioned works for many of the major American orchestras, including Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Minnesota, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and St. Paul.

For Pittsburgh, he composed Silent Spring, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson's epochal book of the same title.

Other noteworthy compositions by Stucky include the symphonic poem Radical Light (2007), Rhapsodies for Orchestra (2008), the oratorio August 4, 1964 (2008), a Symphony (2012), and his Second Concerto for Orchestra (2003), which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Stucky was an expert on the Polish composer Witold Lutosławski and authored the 1981 study Lutoslawski and His Music.

Steven Stucky was long associated with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was resident composer 1988–2009 (the longest such affiliation in American orchestral history); he was host of the New York Philharmonic's Hear & Now series 2005–09; and he was Pittsburgh Symphony Composer of the Year for the 2011–12 season.

There he founded Ensemble X and led it for nine seasons, from 1997 until 2006, while at the same time he also was the guiding force behind the celebrated Green Umbrella series in Los Angeles.

He has also taught at Eastman and Berkeley, the latter as Ernest Bloch Professor in 2003.

He also was curator of the Philharmonia Orchestra's 2013 centenary celebration of that composer, Woven Words: Music Begins Where Words End.

Stucky was the Given Foundation Professor of Composition at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York

After several earlier teaching and conducting visits, in 2013 he became artist-faculty composer-in-residence at Aspen.

He teamed with the celebrated pianist and author Jeremy Denk to create his first opera, The Classical Style (based on the celebrated book by Charles Rosen), which premiered in June 2014 at the Ojai Music Festival.

In 2014 he became Professor Emeritus at Cornell and joined the composition faculty at Juilliard.

Among the composers who studied with Stucky are Joseph Phibbs, Marc Mellits, Robert Paterson, David Conte, Thomas C. Duffy, Yotam Haber, James Matheson, Steven Burke, Xi Wang, Spencer Topel, Diego Vega, Fang Man, Anna Weesner, Hannah Lash, Andrew Waggoner, Stephen Andrew Taylor, Sean Shepherd, Chris Arrell and Jesse Jones.

Steven Stucky taught master classes and served residencies around the world, including Beijing, Shanghai, the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Curtis Institute of Music, Rice University, Lawrence University, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, the Tanglewood Music Center, and many others.

Stucky died of brain cancer at his home in Ithaca, New York on February 14, 2016.

His survivors include his second wife, Kristen Frey Stucky, his two children from his first marriage to Melissa Stucky, Matthew and Maura, two brothers, and two sisters.