Kevin Puts

Composer Kevin Puts received the Pulitzer Prize for music for his debut opera, Silent Night, in 2012. He has also received many other top composition prizes and is a noted educator.

Puts was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Alma, Michigan. He attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and Yale University, earning a D.M.A. degree from the former school. He numbered renowned composers among his teachers, including <a href="spotify:artist:5wfXvI6h0rC0xutmo11UPP">Jacob Druckman</a>, <a href="spotify:artist:4vcYbZ99sbqJHZWEsONSrb">Christopher Rouse</a>, and <a href="spotify:artist:3Y46IlqnuYQKsla21taBPR">Joseph Schwantner</a>; he also had piano instruction from Nelita True. Puts went on for further work at the Tanglewood Music Festival with <a href="spotify:artist:0Uj2XBKJsuZZsf5xSEPfmS">William Bolcom</a> and <a href="spotify:artist:7Mb1O2zCtDyTAsm2cF1Rue">Bernard Rands</a>. From 1996 to 1998, Puts was a Young Concert Artists Composer-in-Residence, and he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001 and the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome the following year. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Puts is the holder of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Composition Prize. Puts taught at the University of Texas from 1999 to 2005, then moved on to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where he remains on the faculty.

In the late '90s, he began to attract commissions from major organizations, including the New York Youth Symphony, which performed his Concerto for Everyone, and the California Symphony, which played his Symphony No. 1, both in 1999. Other early commissions included This Noble Company, premiered by the <a href="spotify:artist:4Ty9IkZ89a93AEwhLGTjo6">Atlanta Symphony</a> in 2003, and River's Rush (2004), performed by the <a href="spotify:artist:4DBdvdTZBJd45Izgjt9Xlg">St. Louis Symphony</a> under <a href="spotify:artist:0xcogVKoT8y5OBIg3L0fua">Leonard Slatkin</a> as part of the orchestra's 125th-anniversary celebrations. In the late 2000s, Puts served as composer-in-residence of the <a href="spotify:artist:25iprcvBsfduvCePYhpsLX">Fort Worth Symphony</a> and composed a violin concerto for its concertmaster, Michael Shih; the orchestra later recorded the work. Puts has composed other concertos, including one for piano commissioned by the <a href="spotify:artist:4Hxxw7mh2x8GpjXWKhdTVH">Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra</a> and one for clarinet, as well as various works for wind band. His cello concerto was premiered by <a href="spotify:artist:5Dl3HXZjG6ZOWT5cV375lk">Yo-Yo Ma</a>. Perhaps Puts' best-known work is Silent Night, which took the 1914 Christmas Truce during World War I as its subject. The work was premiered by the Minnesota Opera in 2011 and has since been performed by leading opera companies in the U.S. and abroad. Puts' other operas include The Manchurian Candidate (2015), Elizabeth Cree (2017), and The Hours (2022). He has also continued to receive commissions from major orchestras in the U.S. and beyond, including the National Symphony, the <a href="spotify:artist:47lbvBv6v9UShnf2jlHcmu">Cincinnati Symphony</a>, and Ensemble Kobe. By the early 2020s, some 30 of Puts' compositions had been recorded. ~ James Manheim, Rovi