Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels Jointly Win the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music
Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels have been awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music for their jointly composed opera Omar. Omar was commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA where it received its world premiere performance on May 27, 2022 at the Sottile Theatre in Charleston, S.C. It was subsequently staged by the LA Opera (October 2022), Carolina Performing Arts (February 2023), and Boston Lyric Opera (May 2023), will be done at the San Francisco Opera (November 2023), and has been published by Subito Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. This prize is the very first time the award has been given to two creators for a jointly-composed work. Omar is based on the autobiography of Omar ibn Said (1770-1864), an Islamic scholar from what is now Senegal who was adbducted in 1807 and taken aboard one of the last trans-Atlantic slave ships to arrive in the United States where he was enslaved for the remainder of his long life. The Pulitzer citation describes Omar as “an innovative and compelling opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, a musical work that respectfully represents African as well as African American traditions, expanding the language of the operatic form while conveying the humanity of those condemned to bondage.”
Rhiannon Giddens, a 1977 native of Greensboro, North Carolina, first became widely known as a founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, an eclectic old timey country band in which she played fiddle and banjo and was the lead singer. She has since recorded four solo albums, the most recent of which, They’re Calling Me Home, a 2021 collaboration with Francesco Turrisi, received the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Folk Album. In 2017, she was award the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” grant. Ms. Giddens serves on New Music USA’s Advisory Council.
Michael Abels, born in 1962 in Phoenix, Arizona, has composed music in a wide variety of genres ranging from the hip-hop influenced film score for the 2019 Jordan Peele film Us to the string quartet At War With Ourselves which was premiered by the Kronos Quartet. He has also produced an album with the late Rev. James Cleveland, who was one of the most significant Black gospel singers and songwriters.
Also nominated as finalists for the 2023 music prize were Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) by Tyshawn Sorey which premiered on February 19, 2022 at the Rothko Chapel, Houston, Texas, and Perspective by Jerrilynn Patton (a.k.a. JLin) which was recorded by Third Coast Percussion on Cedille Records and released on May 13, 2022.
The jury for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Music was: John V. Brown, Jr., Vice Provost for the Arts and Professor of the Practice of Music, Duke University (Chair); past Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Raven Chacon and Du Yun; Arturo O’Farrill, Founder/Artistic Director, Afro Latin Jazz Alliance and Professor, Global Jazz Studies, University of California, Los Angeles; and Carol J. Oja, William Powell Mason Professor of Music, Harvard University. It is the first time in the history of the Pulitzer Prize in Music that all three of the works submitted as finalists by the jury, from which the winner is selected by the Pulitzer board, were by Black composers.
The announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes was made online by Pulitzer Administrator Marjorie Miller via a stream posted on the Pulitzer website which can also be streamed on YouTube.