STEVEN STUCKY (1949–2016)

Deborah Vankin and Craig Nakano report in the Los Angeles Times that the composer Steven Stucky, the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for music and faculty member at Julliard since 2014, died last Sunday morning of brain cancer at his home in upstate New York. He was born in 1949 in Hutchinson, Kansas and attended Baylor University in Waco, Texas, eventually receiving his doctorate in musical arts from Cornell University in Ithaca, where he also lived and taught at the university from 1980 to 2014. He also founded the contemporary music group Ensemble X there in 1997.

Stucky had a long-running relationship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he started at in 1988 when then-music director André Previn appointed him composer in residence. He later became the orchestra’s consulting composer for new music during Previn’s successor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s tenure. The LA Phil commissioned Stucky’s “Second Concerto for Orchestra,” which premiered in March 2004 at Walt Disney Concert Hall and won him the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in music. In 2014, the comic opera “The Classical Style,” by Stucky and librettist Jeremy Denk, became the first opera to premiere at the Ojai Festival.