Lewis Spratlan
www.lewisspratlan.com

Lewis Spratlan, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2000, was born in 1940 in Miami, Florida. His music, often praised for its high dramatic impact and brilliant scoring, is performed regularly throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. A number of works have toured widely, as far afield as Russia and Armenia. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Massachusetts Artists Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, Tanglewood, and the MacDowell Colony. His opera Life is a Dream won a top prize in the Rockefeller Foundation-New England Conservatory Opera Competition and appeared on the New York City Opera’s “Showcasing American Opera” series in 2002; his Apollo and Daphne Variations won the New England Composers Orchestra Competition.

Among recent works are the one-act opera Earthrise, on a libretto by Constance Congdon, commissioned by San Francisco Opera; a piano quartet, Streaming, commissioned by the Ravinia Festival for its centennial celebration; Sojourner for ten players, commissioned for Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress; Zoom, for chamber orchestra, commissioned by the New York ensemble Sequitur; Wonderer, commissioned for the pianist Jonathan Biss by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust; Shadow, commissioned by the cellist Matt Haimovitz; and Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra, a consortium commission by thirty saxophonists across the country. He has recently completed a chamber opera based on the life and work of the architect Louis Kahn. A Summer’s Day, commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor, was premiered on May 22, 2009, at Jordan Hall in Boston.

Life is a Dream will receive its staged world premiere and four additional performances by the Santa Fe Opera in the summer of 2010.

His music is recorded on the Albany, Gasparo, Koch International Classical, Navona, Opus One, and Oxingale labels. Mr. Spratlan's latest recording, In Memoriam, for five vocal soloists, double chorus, and orchestra, and Streaming, for piano quartet, was released in May 2009 on the Navona label.

From 1970 until his retirement in 2006 he served on the music faculty of Amherst College, and has also taught and conducted at Penn State University, Tanglewood, and the Yale Summer School of Music. He lives with his wife Melinda in Amherst, Massachusetts.