American composer Steven Stucky, a 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner and a graduate of Baylor University’s School of Music, died of brain cancer Sunday, Feb. 14, at his Ithaca, New York home. He was 66.

Stucky, one of America’s most frequently performed contemporary classical composers, had been longtime composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and was professor emeritus of composition at Cornell University and on the Juilliard School composition faculty at the time of his death.

He won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for his Second Concerto for Orchestra with his 2008 oratorio “August 4, 1964,” his symphonic poems “Silent Spring” (2011) and “Radical Light” (2007), and 2014 comic opera “The Classical Style: An Opera (Of Sorts)” among his more notable works.

During undergraduate years at Baylor University, Stucky studied composition with Richard Willis and conducting with Daniel Sternberg. He and Robert Sloan, who became Baylor president in 1995, were boyhood friends in Abilene and fellow Baylor students. Stucky graduated from Baylor in 1971, later earning master’s and doctoral degrees from Cornell University.

He is survived by his wife, Kristen, and two children.

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