Charles Wuorinen, Pulitzer-winning modernist composer, 81

Charles Wuorinen, a brilliant modernist composer who was only 31 when his work “Time’s Encomium” became the first electronic piece to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, died March 11 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 81.

The cause of death was complications from a fall in September, said Wuorinen’s press representative Aleba Gartner.

When Wuorinen was awarded his Pulitzer in May 1970, he was the youngest person to win the music prize, a record he would hold until 2017.

Over the course of a career that spanned six decades, the prodigious Wuorinen created more than 270 works, including eight symphonies, four piano concertos, a wide variety of music for percussion, transcriptions and reworkings of pieces by other composers, and two full-length operas: “Haroun and the Sea of Stones” (2004), from a Salman Rushdie novel, and “Brokeback Mountain” (2014), based on the original story by Annie Proulx rather than the celebrated film about a same-sex love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy.

Besides “Time’s Encomium,” Wuorinen was never deeply concerned with electronics. His music was never easy. Still, his early works, especially, were hard-edged, dissonant, fast-paced and bristling with so much musical activity that it was easy to get lost in them. The late critic and editor Shirley Fleming, writing for High Fidelity in 1970, spoke of what she called the unflinching “rationality of Wuorinen’s cerebral makeup, a quality of mind that seems ready to pursue a concept to its final conclusion no matter what conventional ideas may be smashed in the process.”

As composer and person, Wuorinen never had any patience for sentimentality. Told by an interviewer how much more attractive and engaging his music had grown in the 1980s and 1990s, he waved off the compliment with a genial dismissal. “The beat is clearer,” he said. “That is all that has changed.”

To this taste, Wuorinen’s best work – the Symphony Seven, for example, or the Piano Concerto No. 4 – was as virtuosic and colorful as any 19th century virtuoso showpiece; as full of activity as cinéma vérité, with its breathlessly paced quick cuts; as engrossing as a densely packed novel, full of characters and incident.