JENNIFER HIGDON, the multi Grammy award and Pulitzer prize-winning composer, flautist, and long-time professor at Curtis who had zero classical training before college and credits becoming a musician to the local Tennessee radio station, WUOT. Born in Brooklyn New York in 1962, she spent the first ten years of life in Atlanta Georgia before the family made a leap to a 40-acre farm in the middle of nowhere in the Smoky Mountains. Her artist painter father would have the radio on all day in his studio - usually rock n roll and reggae - but one day he switched to classical and Copland’s Appalachian Spring came on while she was standing at the window and she thought, That music sounds like the mountains. And that was the start - even though she didn’t hear much more classical until she hit university and had to furiously catch up. She’d taught herself flute by that stage and progressed through sheer hard graft, right through to the Curtis Institute where she was made professor when she was 32.
Now, with the Pulitzer for her violin concerto and four Grammies, she’s one of the most performed and commissioned American composers - woman or man. Her Blue Cathedral in memory of her brother, who died, has been performed by hundreds of orchestras around the world. And she eventually did get a Ph.D., but still thinks of herself as a black sheep in academia, stressing that music is for everyone and you do not have to have a Ph.D. to understand what’s happening here
MUSIC: Blue Cathedral (1999)
With thanks to WUOT for Todd Steed's interview with Jennifer Higdon: https://www.wuot.org/2023-03-15/jennifer-higdon-comes-home
Presented by composer Joan Tower for International Women’s Month in March, written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
