Shulamit Ran

Shulamit Ran (Hebrew: שולמית רן‎; born October 21, 1949 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983.

Shulamit Ran is a longtime faculty member of the University of Chicago and has served as composer-in-residence with both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Lyric Opera. More recently she wrote a Violin Concerto (2003) for the Israeli violinist Ittai Shapira.

Ran studied with Ralph Shapey and dedicated her Symphony to him.

Many critics have commented on the combination of raw power and classical structure in Ran's work. Ran has written that she considers classical-era composer Ludwig van Beethoven her "compositional idol," and her work combines a taste for rigorous structural logic with a unique brand of "free atonality."

Her students include C. P. First.

External links

• Art of the States: Shulamit Ran
• Shulamit Ran biography, analysis of compositional style and photograph on the site of Presser music publisher and distributor