The first woman to receive the award was Ellen Taaffe Zwilich who won in 1983.

Some of her work during this period was written for her husband, violinist Joseph Zwilich.

In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich ( born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida ) is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

* April 18 – Ellen Taaffe Zwilich becomes the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

* Dr. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich ( Beta Gamma )-First female to win the Pulitzer Prize in music and to receive a doctorate in music composition from Juilliard.

* 1983: Ellen Zwilich, Three Movements for Orchestra ( Symphony No. 1 )

Zwilich began her studies as a violinist, earning a B. M.

He died in 1979, after which point Taaffe Zwilich refocused her compositional efforts on " communicating more directly with performers and listeners ," softening her somewhat harsh, jagged style.

More recently, notable string trios have been written by Murray Adaskin, Alain Bancquart, Robert Carl, Pascal Dusapin, Donald Erb, Karlheinz Essl, Brian Ferneyhough, Berthold Goldschmidt, Sofia Gubaidulina, Bertold Hummel, Talivaldis Kenins, Ernst Krenek, Helmut Lachenmann, Paul Lansky, Ljubica Marić, Krzysztof Meyer, Krzysztof Penderecki, Wayne Peterson, Wolfgang Rihm, Bogusław Schaeffer, Alfred Schnittke, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Graham Waterhouse, Charles Wuorinen, La Monte Young, Iannis Xenakis, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

* Symphony No. 5 ( Concerto for Orchestra ) by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich ( 2008 )

His notable students include John Adams, Milton Babbitt, Jack Behrens, Elmer Bernstein, Robert Cogan, Robert Black, Edward T. Cone, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, David Del Tredici, Alan Fletcher, Carlton Gamer, Steven Gellman, Miriam Gideon, John Harbison, Walter Hekster, Robert Helps, Andrew Imbrie, Earl Kim, Fred Lerdahl, Leon Kirchner, David Lewin, William Mayer, Conlon Nancarrow, Roger Nixon, Will Ogdon, Claire Polin, Einojuhani Rautavaara, William Schimmel, Richard St. Clair, Roland Trogan, George Tsontakis, John Veale, Peter Westergaard, Rolv Yttrehus and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

Reflecting their commitment to expanding the chamber orchestra repertoire, Orpheus has premiered works by Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, Mario Davidovsky, Michael Gandolfi, William Bolcom, Osvaldo Golijov, Fred Lerdahl, Gunther Schuller, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Susan Botti, David Rakowski, Bruce Adolphe, Peter Lieberson, Elizabeth Brown and Han Yong.

* Symphony No. 1 ( Three Movements for Orchestra ), by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich ( 1982 ).

To underscore its commitment to increasing the attention given to women in all disciplines, NMWA commissioned Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich to write Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra inspired by five paintings from the permanent collection, for an opening concert.

This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.

It was certain now that Jess was in the house, but also, presumably, was Stacey Black.

But it also made him conspicuous to the enemy, if it was the enemy, and he hadn't been spotted already.

He was asking had it been she who left the love note in his sheets ( she also served as maid ) when he saw the Grafin followed by a stately blond girl approaching his table.

This was also a corpse -- a male, judging from the coral arm bands, the tribal scars still discernible on the maggoty face, the painted bone of the warrior caste which still pierced the septum of the rotting nose.

His superiors had also preached this, saying it was the way for eternal honor.

Charles, also fifteen, was tall and skinny, scraggly, with straight black hair like an Indian's and sharp brown eyes.

Although New Orleans was not to learn of it for a spell, she also was a sadist, a nymphomaniac and unobtrusively mad -- the perpetrator of some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed on American soil.

There was also a dog, a dingo dog.

There was also a long wooden spear and a woomera, a spear-throwing device which gives the spear an enormous velocity and high accuracy.

There was also a boomerang, elaborately carved.

It was also subtly familiar, for it was the odor of the human body, but multiplied innumerable times because of the fact that the aborigines never bathed.

It was to provide a safe and spacious crossing for these caravans, and also to make a pleasance for the city, that Shah Abbas 2, in about 1657 built, of sun-baked brick, tile, and stone, the present bridge.

There was also a lesson, one that has served ever since to keep Americans, in their conflicts with one another, from turning from the ballot to the bullet.

Joseph Jastrow, the younger son of the distinguished rabbi, Marcus Jastrow, was a friendly, round-faced fellow with a little mustache, whose field was psychology, and who was also a punster and a jolly tease.

And just as `` Laurie '' Lawrence was first attracted to bright Jo March, who found him immature by her high standards, and then had to content himself with her younger sister Amy, so Joe Jastrow, who had also been writing Henrietta before he came to Johns Hopkins, had to content himself with her younger sister, pretty Rachel.

she also went to Washington and appealed to Senator George William Norris of Nebraska, the Fighting Liberal, from whose office a sympathetic but cautious harrumphing was heard.

The Indians who came aboard ship to collect the mail also interested her greatly, even if she was suitably shocked, according to the customs of the society in which she had been reared, to find them `` naked, except a piece of cotton cloth wrapped around their middle ''.

He also disliked Runyon, for no good reason other than the fact that the Demon's talent was so marked as to put him well beyond the Hetman's say-so or his supervision.

But her prettiness was what he had noticed first, and all the other things had come afterward: cruelty, meanness, self-will.

There was an artificial lake just out of sight in the first stand of trees, fed by a half dozen springs that popped out of the ground above the hillside orchard.

The first part of the road was steep, but it leveled off after the second bend and curled gradually into the valley.

No one was behind it, but in the rear wall of the office I noticed, for the first time, a door which had been left partially open.

The herd was watered and then thrown onto a broad grass flat which was to be the first night's bedground.

Once again, Tom Horn was the first and most likely suspect, and he was brought in for questioning immediately.

For Matilda, it was the first she had known in many a night.

Even the knowledge that she was losing another boy, as a mother always does when a marriage is made, did not prevent her from having the first carefree, dreamless sleep that she had known since they dropped down the canyon and into Bear Valley, way, way back there when they were crossing those other mountains.

Stevens was grunting over the last empty pocket when Russ abruptly rose and lunged toward Carmer's hat, which had tumbled half-a-dozen feet away when he first fell.

The Indian's arm whipped sidewise -- there was a flash of amber and froth, the crash of the bottle shattering against the side of the first car.

It was her first smile.

At first, I thought he was out of his head, talking wildly like this.

Hell, I gave him the first decent job he ever had, six, seven -- how many years ago was it, Rob ''??

Miss Langford ( her first name was Evelyn ) was an attractive girl.

School began in August, the hottest part of the year, and for the first few days Miss Langford was very lenient with the children, letting them play a lot and the new ones sort of get acquainted with one another.

It was just as well that the ignorant Dandy enjoyed himself to the hilt that first evening, for the room was to become his prison cell.

`` Bastards '', he would say, `` all I did was put a beat to that Vivaldi stuff, and the first chair clobbered me ''!!

In 1961 the first important legislative victory of the Kennedy Administration came when the principle of national responsibility for local economic distress won out over a `` state's-responsibility '' proposal -- provision was made for payment for unemployment relief by nation-wide taxation rather than by a levy only on those states afflicted with manpower surplus.

The first systematic thinking about this Pandora's box within Pandora's boxes was done four years ago by Fred Ikle, a frail, meek-mannered Swiss-born sociologist.

The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.

His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.