2023 Pulitzer Prize for Music Names Winners

Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels have won the prestigious award and a $15,000 cash prize for their joint composition of the opera, Omar 

The Pulitzer Prize for Music is awarded annually for a distinguished musical composition by an American that had its first performance or recording produced in the U.S. during the year. 

Acclaimed composers Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels’ winning work Omar is an opera about enslaved people brought to North America from Muslim countries, and its music depicts various elements of African and African American traditions.

Giddens and Abels drew inspiration from the 1831 autobiography of West African scholar Omar ibn Said, which began long before he was forced to board a ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina — the site of his initial enslavement. 

Involving more than biographical facts to tell Said’s story, the score also records his steadfast Muslim faith and fuses traditional opera instrumentation.  

Co-commissioned and co-produced by Carolina Performing Arts and the Spoleto Festival USA, the work premiered at the latter in May 2022, in Charleston. Additional co-commissioners included LA Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. 

“It feels amazing, because Michael and I just put into this what we know,” Giddens told The New York Times on her win for Omar. “It was a love letter to my country. There’s so much to hate about it, but what I love about it is that ability that people have to come together and make some new amazing thing. American music is a spectrum.”

“It shows the importance of telling all of our stories through our fine art, that people are waking up to the truth of that statement and the importance of our stories’ being part of our full artistic legacy,” Abels said.

A discussion with Giddens and Abels can be viewed below.