Charles Wuorinen, winner of the 1970 Pulitzer Prize in Music and composer of the operas "Brokeback Mountain" and "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," died from injuries sustained in a fall last September. He was 81.
Wuorinen, who composed more than 270 works, died Wednesday at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, spokeswoman Aleba Gartner said Thursday.
Known for much of his career as an admirer of the 12-tone system of composition, Wuorinen was opinionated.
"We have a world in which the instant response of the untutored becomes the sole criterion for judgment,'' he told The New York Times in 1988, ahead of his 50th birthday. "A great work like a Beethoven symphony becomes like a blob of toothpaste. There is the bored orchestra. There are the indifferent audiences. They wait it through. They applaud. They leave."
Just two years ago, he decried the awarding of that year's Pulitzer Prize in Music to hip-hop artist Kendrick Lamar, telling the Times that signaled "the final disappearance of any societal interest in high culture."
Born in New York on June 9, 1938, Wuorinen's father, John, was chairman of Columbia University's history department. Wuorinen received a bachelor's degree from Columbia in 1961 and a master's in music two years later.
He won the New York Philharmonic's Young Composers' Award when he was 16 and premiered a choral work "O Filii et Filiae (Sons and Daughters)" at Town Hall in 1954.
Wuorinen was 32 when he won the Pulitzer for "Time's Encomium," a four-channel work for synthesized sound that became the first electronic composition to earn the honor.
His work was cerebral. "Haroun," based on a children's novel by Salman Rushdie and with a libretto by James Fenton, premiered at the New York City Opera in 2004. It opened with references to Boccaccio, Proust, Tolstoy and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Actions that befuddle were called "P2C2E" — "a Process Too Complicated to Explain." The chorus sang out: "This is minimalism," prompting the audience to a laugh.
"Brokeback," based on a short story by Annie Proulx about two cowboys in love, was first adapted into a movie and then an opera. It was commissioned by New York City Opera but moved to Madrid's Teatro Real and premiered in 2014 after City Opera filed for bankruptcy.
"It is very beautiful, as the film shows," Wuorinen told The Associated Press, "but it is definitely not sentimental. It is not a romantic landscape. It's a deadly one — it's dangerous."
"Brokeback" finally reached the reconstituted New York City Opera for its American premiere in 2018.
Longtime Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine was among Wuorinen's advocates and conducted the 2008 premiere of "Time Regained," a fantasy for piano and orchestra. Levine commissioned five works by Wuorinen, including his Fourth Piano Concerto for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and pianist Peter Serkin for its premiere in 2003.
Wuorinen wrote six compositions for the New York City Ballet. His last completed work was his Second Percussion Symphony, debuted by Miami's New World Symphony last September.
He is survived by his husband of 32 years, Howard Stokar.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More