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 for Music. In this regard, she was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.

Born in Israel in 1949, Shulamit Ran began composing songs to Hebrew poetry at the age of seven. By the age of nine, she was studying composition with some of Israel’s top composers, most notably Alexander Boskovich and Paul Ben-Haim. As a child, Jewish cantoral music played on the radio by her father had a huge impact on Ran. This is apparent in her opera Between Two Worlds-The Dybbuk.

She was able to continue her composition studies into her adult years with scholarships from Mannes College of Music in New York and the American Israel Cultural Foundation. In addition to piano, she studied composition with Norman Dello Joio and Ralph Shapey. While in the United States, studied piano with Nadia Reisenberg and Dorothy Taubman. During her time in the US, Shapey and composer Elliott Carter helped shape Ran’s compositional voice, which was constantly changing.

After studying with Shapey, he invited Ran to follow in his path of music education. In 1973, at the age of 26, Shulamit Ran joined the faculty at University of Chicago, where she currently serves as the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and as artistic director of Contempo (formerly the Contemporary Chamber Players). Ran retired from her position at the University of Chicago in June 2015. She also became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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