Is it my imagination or am I the only person writing on the web who can't stop obsessing about the Pulitzer Prize for Music this week?

I pretty much couldn't do anything most of the week except to write a lengthy essay about my still completely conflicted thoughts about the whole thing which we posted on NewMusicBox last night.

Last year, after the Pulitzer issued its "Alter and Affirm" statement, everyone was coming out of the woodwork to chime in on what the Pulitzer should or should not award. This week Steven Stucky won the award, and everyone is silent. Not a single post on NewMusicBox, here at Sequenza21 or anyone else's blog for that matter. Where's the joy? Where's the outrage? In a nutshell, where is everybody? Are we happy the award still went to a formidable orchestral composition rather than the latest pop album fad as many worried?

Once I posted the article I thought I'd be done with it myself. But thoughts still linger. I've been trolling around Lawrence Dillon's list of pieces influential to American composers over the past several decades as well as Kyle Gann's thoughtful response to it and nary a Pulitzer Prize winner among them. Does that mean that the Pulitzer picks bad pieces as some have claimed? Or does it mean that the pieces that win don't get sufficient exposure after they do? Yes, Transmigration raked in the Grammys, but we're still waiting for a commercial CD of Henry Brant's Ice Field, despite the fact that innova has been putting out all those great Henry Brant recordings.

Far be it for me to suggest that a composer get less money—heaven knows we get so little as it is—but maybe the money for the monetary part of the prize would be better spent guaranteeing that the work had a viable commercial recording? Or maybe there'd be money left over from that $50 application fee to fund such an endeavor without taking away any money from the poor composer (or his representative advocate in some cases) who is already out $50 for applying in the first place.

Clearly this is a Pulitzer problem unique to the music prize since anyone could go out and look up the award-winning articles or buy the novel that won in any given year. But now my mind keeps thinking about the Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction and Poetry. I consider myself fairly well read and a big fan of modern American literature, yet precious few of the winners of the past couple of decades have made it into my reading library. What does that mean? And why isn't anyone complaining that Thomas Pynchon never got a Pulitzer and no one is worried that Danielle Steel might ever get one?