Paul Moravec

Paul Moravec ranks among the contemporary composers whose music receives the most frequent performances, thanks to a style often characterized as neo-tonalist and readily accessible. The 2004 chamber composition Tempest Fantasy earned him the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Born in Buffalo, New York, on November 2, 1957, Moravec studied at Harvard University, where he performed with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and completed a B.A. in composition. After receiving the Prix de Rome and spending time at the American Academy in Rome, he obtained both a master’s degree and a doctorate from Columbia University. Dartmouth College appointed him to its faculty immediately after he finished the D.M.A., a position he held through 1996. He joined Hunter College in 1997 and later moved to Adelphi University on Long Island, where he continues to teach. In 2007-2008 he also served as composer-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. During a National Public Radio conversation Moravec discussed his experiences with depression. “In essence, I came out,” he told The New York Times, “speaking about something very personal, in part because I hoped to help overcome the stigma that attaches to mental illness.” He has linked his recovery to the creative impetus behind Tempest Fantasy, the Pulitzer-winning piece scored for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. Among his other widely recognized compositions are Northern Lights Electric (1994), Fire/Ice/Air (1998, which portrays the journeys of Charles Lindbergh and Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott), and the oratorio Blizzard Voices (2008), which honors the Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888 that claimed the lives of numerous children. In 2013 he returned to the American Academy in Rome as composer-in-residence. The Oratorio Society of New York gave the premiere of his oratorio Sanctuary Road, which concerns the Underground Railroad, in 2018; the Naxos label issued a recording in 2020. By that date, more than two dozen additional works by Moravec had appeared on disc.