Biography
Robert Ward was born in 1917 in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied with Howard Hanson and Bernard Rogers at the Eastman School of Music; with Frederick Jacobi. Bernard Wagenaar, Albert Stoessel, and Edgar Schenkman at the Juilliard Graduate School; and with Aaron Copland at the Berkshire Music Center. He has served on the faculties of Queens College, Columbia University, and the Juilliard School of Music where he was also Assistant to the President from 1952 to 1956. He was the Director of the Third Street Music School Settlement from 1952 to 1955. He was Executive Vice-President and Managing Editor of Galaxy Music Corporation and Highgate Press until 1967, when he became President of the North Carolina School of the Arts. Until his retirement in 1987, he was the Mary Duke Biddle Professor of Music at Duke University.
Mr. Ward's considerable and distinguished musical creation has largely been commissioned by the New York City Opera, Broadcast Music Inc., the New York Philharmonic, the Friends of Dumbarton Oaks, the Juilliard Musical Foundation, and many others. His opera The Crucible, based on the play by Arthur Miller, won both the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the New York Music Critics Circle Citation for the same year.
The Eastman School of Music honored Robert Ward with its Alumni Achievement Award in 1972.
-From Sigma Alpha Iota Web site, 11/21/05