Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is one of the most recognized, performed, and sought-after composers active today. She was the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. Zwilich was a member of Leopold Stokowski's American Symphony Orchestra. The Juilliard Symphony Orchestra under conductor Pierre Boulez programmed Zwilich's Symposium for Orchestra in 1975. At first, Zwilich wrote music in the modernist vein pursued by her teachers, but after the death of her husband, violinist Joseph Zwilich in 1979, she felt a need to communicate with audiences more directly and adopted an idiom that, though contemporary, was marked by influences from Romanticism. By the early 2020s, some 50 of Zwilich's compositions had been recorded, some multiple times. A longtime professor at her alma mater, Florida State, Zwilich is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.