Lewis Spratlan

Lewis Spratlan was an American composer known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Life Is a Dream. He was also a passionate educator, and a respected oboist and conductor. He was born in Miami, Florida, in 1940, and became very interested in music at a young age. He played the oboe in school, and when he was a teenager his oboe instructor encouraged him to compose. This led him to discover that he enjoyed composing even more than performing. After high school, he entered Yale University as an English major but changed his focus to music when he was a sophomore. Following the completion of his bachelor’s degree in 1962, he studied composition with Mel Powell and Gunther Schuller and received his master’s degree in music composition in 1965. The following year, he received additional instruction from Roger Sessions and George Rochberg at the Berkshire Music Center. His earliest published works -- Unsleeping City, Missa Brevis, and Flange -- were composed around this time. From 1967 to 1970, Spratlan conducted and taught at Penn State University, where he founded both the improvisation ensemble and the electronic music studio. This was followed by 36 years as a professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts. He composed several pieces of vocal and chamber music in the '70s, including the opera Life Is a Dream, which was commissioned by the New Haven Opera. However, the company went out of business before Spratlan completed the work in 1978, which delayed its premiere indefinitely. Two years later, he composed the chamber piece Coils, which received much attention because it utilized a unique instrument designed by Spratlan called the terpsiptomaton. He also received a Guggenheim fellowship. By this time, he'd started to infuse his music with diverse elements from pop, jazz, and South Indian music. In 2000, a concert version of the second act of his opera Life Is a Dream won the Pulitzer Prize, and the work finally received its premiere in 2010, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Spratlan was recognized by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which awarded him the Charles Ives Opera Prize in 2016. His music and conducting were featured on the 2009 album Lewis Spratlan: In Memoriam, and in the 2010s his compositions appeared on Lewis Spratlan: Architect with Mark Lane Swanson, Lewis Spratlan: Apollo & Daphne Variations with Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Lewis Spratlan: Hesperus Is Phosphorus with Donald Nally and the Crossing. Spratlan passed away in 2023, just six months after the release of Lewis Spratlan: Invasion - Music and Art for Ukraine with pianist Nadia Shpachenko.
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