Biography

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for a song cycle called "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf," a setting of eight entries from Woolf's diaries.

After serving in the Army, he studied at the Peabody Institute conservatory in Baltimore on the G.I. Bill. He received a doctorate in musical composition from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.

He was an American song-writer and opera composer and librettist. He worked in Minneapolis throughout his career, taught composition at the University of Minnesota, and worked with director Sir Tyrone Guthrie at what became the Guthrie Theater.

He was awarded the the title Composer Laureate from November 28, 1997 until February 20, 2019.

He was awarded the National Opera Association Lifetime Achievement Award on January 10, 2004 in Kansas City, Missouri.

The voice is not just another instrument. It's the instrument par excellence, the original instrument, a part of the performer rather than an adjunct to him.

I do think of myself as a Minnesota composer,

A parent inculcates ideas, develops tastes, provides guidance, and in effect molds the child from birth through its early years. But the child soon develops its own ideas, cultivates its own tastes, resists external guidance, and ultimately becomes its own master, often with unanticipated results. My compositions, like children, have surprised me that way.