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How does
it feel to share the limelight with rock legend Bob Dylan?
This
year’s Pulitzer Prizes honored two musical innovators who
tend to reject categorization: A special citation went to
singer-songwriter Dylan, and the annual music award went
to composer David Lang.
In an
interview Monday, Lang enthusiastically mixed metaphors as
he said, “You know, I am not fit to touch the hem of his
shoes. Bob Dylan is the only artist who’s in heavy
rotation in my household.”
He added,
“I told my children I won the Pulitzer, and they were
like, ‘OK, big deal.’ But when I said, ‘OK, they gave a
special award to Bob Dylan, just like me,’ they said, ‘Oh,
this is really something.’”
SINGER Bob Dylan in London,
April 27, 1965 -- AP
Dylan, 66,
who said he was “in disbelief,” was cited for “his
profound impact on popular music and American culture,
marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic
power.” His award marks the first Pulitzer given to a rock
musician.
Lang, 51,
cofounder and coartistic director of the New York music
collective Bang on a Can, won his prize for The Little
Match Girl Passion, which premiered October 25, 2007,
at Carnegie Hall in New York. The piece, Lang said, was
born of his personal struggle as a Jewish composer trying
to reconcile the fact that much of classical music is
rooted in Christian tradition.
“It’s a
very strange thing for a Jewish composer like me to deal
with,” he said. “The Bach St. Matthew Passion is one of
the greatest pieces of all time and one that is not
particularly good for the Jews.”
Lang said
he decided to use the text from the crowd scenes in the
Bach piece and, wherever there was a reference to the
Crucifixion, instead inserted a reference to the death of
the little match girl from the Hans Christian Andersen
tale, who froze to death in plain sight of neighbors who
would not help her.
Lang, who
spent his youth selling records at Tower Records and
Wherehouse Records in Los Angeles, said he tries to avoid
all labels for his work, including the wide-open category
“new music.”
“My whole
life was about records,” he said, “and when you go into
the record store, you see the world divided—here’s rock
’n’ roll, here’s jazz, here’s opera. I am someone who
wakes up in the morning and goes out of his way to make
sure that my work does not belong in one of those boxes.”
This
year’s arts awards also included playwright Tracy Letts, a
longtime member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company,
for his critically hailed Broadway tragicomedy about a
dysfunctional Oklahoma family, August: Osage County.
New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it
“probably the most exciting new American play Broadway has
seen in years,” adding: “Oh, forget probably. It is.”
In
literature, Junot Diaz won the prize for fiction for
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The novel,
Diaz’s first book since his hit short-story collection,
Drown, in 1996, concerns the “ghetto nerd” of its title,
an awkward teenager who aims to become “the Dominican
Tolkien.” Profane, street smart, erudite and at times
graphically violent, the novel juxtaposes a very personal
coming-of-age story in contemporary New Jersey with
flashbacks to Dominican history.
Saul
Friedlander, a holocaust survivor and University of
California, Los Angeles, faculty member, won the general
nonfiction award for The Years of Extermination: Nazi
Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. UCLA professor
emeritus Daniel Walker Howe won for history for What
Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of
America, 1815-1848.
John Matteson won for biography for
Eden’s Outcasts:
The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.
For the
first time in Pulitzer history, two prizes were awarded in
poetry, to Robert Haas for Time and Materials and
Philip Schultz for Failure. Haas, an English
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is
noted for drawing on everyday imagery, often from the
California
countryside. Schultz, the author of five collections of
poetry, including the National Book Award nominee Like
Wings, founded the Writers Studio in 1987.
Times staff writer Scott Timberg contributed to this
report |
