Yet, from the works that first brought him wide attention — including his Symphony No. 1 in 1986, an elegiac yet nightmarish score written for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra that quotes from Bruckner and Shostakovich — Mr. Rouse drew on myriad sources and styles to create his distinctive musical voice.

Elements of atonality and sturdy diatonic harmony and moments of fleeting lyricism and blazing sonorities often merge or clash. He spent two formative years after college studying privately with the composer George Crumb, whose work with experimental instrumental sounds and colors left a lasting impression on him.

The loss of friends and family often motivated the severity, rage and mournfulness in many of Mr. Rouse’s earlier works. “I am known for writing a very dark, disturbing music,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2000. “It just happened that every time I had a piece to write, somebody died whose death had a big effect on me.”

He won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1993, for the Trombone Concerto, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, which gave the premiere with Leonard Slatkin conducting and Joseph Alessi, the Philharmonic’s principal trombone, as soloist.

Written in three connected movements, the concerto was a memorial to Leonard Bernstein, who died in 1990; in it Mr. Rouse quotes from Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony, named after the Jewish prayer of mourning.