A populist turn for Pulitzers

The Pulitzer Prize Board expected some grumblings about “dumbing down” the music prize when it announced last week that it was broadening the eligible entries to include jazz, film and musical theater works in addition to the usual classical forms. It’s heard such criticism before.

“Last year, the drama prize went to a play called ‘Anna in the Tropics,’ which was premiered in Miami and had not yet been performed in New York,” said Jay Harris, chairman of the committee that recommended the changes and chairman of journalism and communication at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

“There was the predictable hand-wringing in some circles that it did not meet the basic criteria of excellence. It’s a wonderful story, very well told, from a different culture, and it came out of regional theater. And there’s now the realization that the best of plays could come out of regional theater.”

Similarly, when The Times’ automotive critic, Dan Neil, won the Pulitzer for criticism this year, complaints started anew.

“That prize is a good example of the point here,” Harris said. “The board is made up primarily of journalists. What they were looking at was excellence in the area of criticism. That can be done of more than arts and letters. It can be done of architecture. It can be done of automobiles. Automobiles are a major part of life in America and a major part of our culture.

“Look at the work of Gershwin or an Ellington or a Sondheim. You really have to be hard-pressed to deny that while this is different from what many people have considered to be the acme of culture, it is very, very well done. And others who really know music appreciate the quality of what was done.”

The new definitions will not favor any particular type of music, Harris said. Also, the board will no longer require the submission of a music score (a recording may be substituted), allowing for the consideration of improvisational work. And jury pools will draw on a wider range of music experts.

For all the changes, Harris has faith that future committees will do the right thing.

“We don’t have to tell the fiction committee, which is made up of persons who are expert in their evaluation of letters, that summer beach books are not what we have in mind,” he said.

As for all the hand-wringing: “I think it was Edward Gibbon who said, essentially, there is a tendency of people at all times to think that their civilization is at a point of crisis and decline. While America has been worried about that at many points in the last 200 years, I think we could agree that, on the whole, things have gotten better. If it’s all going to hell, it is a rather long and winding journey.”