Henry Threadgill has been awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for music this year at a ceremony in New York City last evening (Oct 13, 2016). Threadgill has been known as “a composer and bandleader of intense, unyielding originality, and nobody’s idea of a compromise,” to quote the New York Times. He is both a composer and multi-instrumentalist who studied composition at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. A highly respected artist, he is one of those rare composers whose work has been celebrated at a festival dedicated to his work while he is still living, at the two-day “Very Very Threadgill” festival in New York City in 2014 where well known musicians from all genres came together to play a retrospective of his work. It comes as no surprise to many that he has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for music this year. But in many ways, his award also comes as a breakthrough moment for an original and iconoclastic voice in music, one that has not followed the traditional path to be recognized with a Pulitzer. Threadgill has had numerous commissions and awards throughout his career. He has composed music for theatre, orchestra, solo instruments, and chamber ensembles. With dozens of albums throughout his career that have won him accolades, it was his album “In For a Penny, In For A Pound” released in 2015 that won him the Pulitzer. It is a work written in four main movements to be performed in a chamber space for tuba, cello, guitar, saxophone/flute and drums. Threadgill has a strong connection to Nagaland, as he has been married to Senti Toy from Nagaland for the past twenty-five years. Senti Toy, herself a singer songwriter started off her musical career in Mumbai as a recording artist whose voice was used for numerous advertisements for TV, radio and films. She went on to release her own album that was received with much critical international acclaim, one that was also picked as one of 2007’s top ten albums by the Wall Street Journal. So far that has been her only album. She went on to get her doctoral degree in Ethnomusicology. Senti Toy lives with her husband in New York City.
