Peterson: A Bay Area Music Fixture

Wayne Peterson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning music, “The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,” was premiered by conductor David Zinman and the San Francisco Symphony last October. Though a fixture of the Bay Area new-music world--Peterson was on the faculty at San Francisco State University from 1960-90--he is largely unknown here.

Born in Minnesota in 1927, Peterson studied at the University of Minnesota with Paul Fetler and others, and with Lennox Berkeley at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He is also a jazz pianist, and has held numerous National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim fellowship.

“When I start a piece, where I’m going emerges in the process. I proceed intuitively,” he said in the San Francisco Chronicle before “The Face of the Night” premiere. “My jazz experience comes out in my feeling for rhythm but I’m not even sure that a jazz player would recognize it.

“This piece, ‘The Face of the Night, the Heart of the Dark,’ is exciting rhythmically but not in the jazzy sense. . . . The title is a quote from Thomas Wolfe, suggesting moods I expressed in the piece, and it was chosen after the fact.”

Peterson could not be reached for comment immediately after the Pulitzer award was announced Tuesday.