Partita for 8 Voices by Caroline Shaw has been awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Also nominated in this category were Aaron Jay Kernis’s Pieces of Winter Sky and Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers.

Robert Ward believed that artists weren’t always outsiders, but people who could sit at the table beside donors, industrialists, and scientists and provide a different perspective on society.

The MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has announced its 2013 grants. The Fund will underwrite 41 new projects in the disciplines of dance, theater, and music, all works that in some way explore the boundaries of contemporary performance practices.

In its 89th annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 175 fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars.

Award winners and the groups co-sponsoring their commissions are Tristan Murail and YarnWire; Kaija Saariaho and Da Camera of Houston; Ronald Bruce Smith and the Del Sol Quartet; Kate Soper and Alarm Will Sound; and Wang Jie and the League of Composers/ISCM (the U.S. chapter of the International Society of Contemporary Music).

Jeffery Cotton—composer, entrepreneur, essayist, and fiction writer—has left us with a trove of darkly hued, deeply lyrical works that can be heard as a film noir soundtrack evoking the deceptively sunny Los Angeles of his childhood filtered through the haunted German expressionism he encountered as a student of Henze. But an artist’s life is not wholly contained in finished works.

Tan Dun joins the ranks of Nelson Mandela, Rigoberta Menchu Túm, Forest Whitaker, Susana Rinaldi, Herbie Hancock, Placido Domingo, and Jean Michel Jarre in being named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the sixteen recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $185,000.

The Kronos Performing Arts Association announced today that the Kronos Quartet will welcome a new cellist, Sunny Jungin Yang, to the ensemble this June. Yang will succeed Jeffrey Zeigler, who has performed with the quartet for the past eight seasons and will step down from the group this May.

It wasn’t about music in any technical sense, but really more in a social sense: How music fit into his life, how he created community, what he cared about, what he didn’t care about, and so on. The fact that Butch was fun, charming, a great person to travel with, to dine and drink with, and to hang with is something everyone who knew Butch can speak to. I would like to speak to two singular aspects of Butch’s contribution to music since he came on the scene in the ‘70s: community and conduction.