Meriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr was an award winning American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music best known for winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music and the Charles Ives Opera Award. Spratlan attended Yale University for his undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1970 he served on the music faculty of Amherst College, and also taught and conducted at Penn State University, Tanglewood, and the Yale Summer School of Music. He taught music composition and theory, special ... moreMeriwether Lewis Spratlan Jr was an award winning American music academic and composer of contemporary classical music best known for winning the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in music and the Charles Ives Opera Award. Spratlan attended Yale University for his undergraduate and graduate degrees. In 1970 he served on the music faculty of Amherst College, and also taught and conducted at Penn State University, Tanglewood, and the Yale Summer School of Music. He taught music composition and theory, special courses on Beethoven and others, and coached chamber music for 36 years at Amherst College. He was the founding conductor of the Amherst Mount Holyoke Orchestra and acting director of the Amherst College Orchestra. As he taught he played, he retired from Amherst in 2006. In 2000 he received the Pulitzer Prize in music for a concert version of Act Two of his opera "Life Is A Dream". He was also a recipient of other awards like Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell Fellowships, as well as the Charles Ives Opera Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
