Event Calendar & News: Alumni News

PBS airs 'The Making of the 4th Symphony of Ellen Zwilich'

In October 2001, 65 members of the MSU Alumni Club of Metropolitan New York City convened to preview "The Making of the 4th Symphony of Ellen Zwilich" before it aired nationally on PBS.

The film captured the entire creative process used by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich to compose Symphony No. 4, The Gardens. This major work was commissioned by MSU alumni Jack and Dottie Withrow in 2000 to commemorate the beauty of the MSU campus and gardens.

Zwilich is one of the world's premiere composers, and was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in music, among numerous other awards. In 1995, she was named to the first Composer's Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall. MSU's WKARTV and Libraries Computing and Technology (LCT) produced the film. In Summer 2002, it was nominated for five Michigan Emmys, in which it won in the category of audio post-production by Nancy Kelly with WKAR-TV.