It was right here in this house," Kevin Puts says of the phone call that changed his life. We're sitting in the kitchen of his rangy Arts and Crafts home in a leafy corner of Yonkers, New York. It's an early fall morning, but the Peabody composition professor— shoeless and casually clad in a black pullover—is reflecting on an unseasonably warm April afternoon in 2012. An otherwise mundane Monday when the pressing issue was whether to take his toddler son, Ben, to play in the park after his nap.
But then his phone buzzed to life: Unknown Caller. Uh, you know what this usually means: We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty … Puts let it go to voicemail. "Then I remembered that they were announcing the Pulitzers that day, and I said to my wife, 'Oh, maybe they're calling me to tell me I won,'" Puts says with a grin. "And I was totally joking."
No, it wasn't the Pulitzer Prize Board calling. (They don't do that, Puts learned.) It was an Associated Press reporter looking to interview the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music. That's how Puts (pronounced like the verb "puts") discovered his opera Silent Night, commissioned by the Minnesota Opera Company that debuted the work the previous fall, had won. The two-act opera moves from joyfulness to heartbreak while musically telling the improbable (but largely true) tale of an impromptu Christmastime truce among French, German, and British soldiers entrenched along sections of the Western Front in World War I.
Puts had just turned 40 and his first opera had won one of music's highest honors. "It was really shocking and not something I expected he says, noting that it was the opera company that had nominated the work. During the nearly two years he toiled on Silent Night, his mind wasn't on prizes but on the people who'd be coming to see it. "Can I engage them?" Puts wondered. "Will this work?" Needless to say, his phone was buzzing the rest of that day—and has been ringing ever since as orchestras, opera companies, chamber groups, and the occasional diva reach out to discuss potential projects, collaborations, and commissions.
A lot has happened in the dozen years since the fateful call. A now teenage Ben has moved on from playing in the park to playing music as an ardent and accomplished cellist. That's Ben's instrument by the fireplace in the adjoining living-cum-music room, which also features a grand piano in a bay window and the hulking bulk of a marimba trying to be hidden (rather unsuccessfully) behind a sofa. The electronic drumkit here seems an anomaly—one of his son's musical whims, Puts explains. His wife, Lisa GiHae Kim, a violinist with the New York Philharmonic, completes the musical family. The three sometimes sight-read trios around the piano.
Since Silent Night, Puts has penned three more well-received operas, most notably The Hours, based on the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham and the 2002 film of the same name that pay tribute to Virginia Woolf's 1923 work Mrs. Dalloway. The Metropolitan Opera co-commissioned the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra and staged it to sold-out crowds in 2022. As a sign of sonic success perhaps even more telling than any prize, the Met brought the opera back for an encore run earlier this year—the first commissioned piece the company has performed in consecutive seasons in nearly a century.
His awards shelf has expanded, too. The nation's oldest classical music magazine, Musical America, named Puts Composer of the Year in 2024. And last year he picked up his first Grammy when his triple concerto Contact, recorded by the trio Time for Three and the Philadelphia Orchestra, won Best Contemporary Classical Composition. "Oh, I've got to show you this," Puts says, reaching for a red, satin-covered box atop the piano. It's part of his latest accolade. A week earlier, Puts was in China accepting the 1573 Award for Best Composer as part of the International Festival of Poetry and Liquor. While it sounds like something out of Monty Python, it's a prestigious arts and culture event that just happens to be co-sponsored by a Chinese distillery founded in 1573.
"There was a concert of my work with the Shanghai Symphony, and I spoke at the Shanghai Conservatory and the Central Conservatory," Puts says. "It was a great trip." (Oh, the red box contains an ornate, gilt bottle of the fiery hooch baijiu.)
The Puts family might play music here, but it's not where he composes. To see that, I follow him up two flights of creaky stairs to a renovated attic space tucked under the eaves. "It's small and not very glamorous but it's all I need," he says of the white-washed nook. Beethoven composed in similar garretlike surroundings, and contemporaries of the old master describe his "upright pianoforte" set amid "white walls with dusty old wallpaper … directly under the roof." This is clearly the musical lair of a 21st-century composer, what with the electric keyboard and large computer screen running the music notation software Sibelius.
On the screen is the work-in-progress oratorio A House of Tomorrow, based on the writings of Lebanese American author Kahlil Gibran, a work for mezzo-soprano, chorus, and orchestra to premiere next fall. "This is the new piece I just finished about Emily Dickinson," Puts says pointing to some printed copies of a song cycle written for celebrated mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato. "We're having a workshop next weekend."
Suffice it to say, Puts' musical journey continues apace. But how did a Midwestern-born son of schoolteachers become the toast of the opera and concert hall stage?
His musical road was not a straightforward affair, though his love of the classical canon was cemented early by his parents, both teachers and amateur musicians, who enjoyed playing Beethoven, Mozart, and Dvořák records. Born in St. Louis, Puts spent most of his childhood in rural Michigan. When a Kimball upright piano was added to the household, he took to it with abandon—picking out tunes by ear. He wasn't deaf to the popular music of the day, counting rockers Van Halen and Def Leppard among his youthful faves, but once he started piano lessons, it was the classical repertoire that held allure. "Music that was longer than three or four minutes was more interesting," he says. (Puts does keep an ear on musical happenings beyond the classical stage and once wrote a symphony inspired by a Björk album.)
When he began his extensive musical education, which ultimately included bachelor and doctoral degrees from the Eastman School of Music and a master's from Yale, he was focused on becoming a pianist. Early on he decided to bolster his musical education by vying for scholarship opportunities and entering competitions, both of which largely involved composition. During his freshman year, he won a composing scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Later, he landed a couple of composer-in-residence positions, one with the California Symphony.
"Painful rejection letters" were in the competition mix as well, he says, but they helped him "find his voice" among the various musical styles he explored—Stravinsky-like dissonance to minimalism to lush romanticism. As he gained his sea legs in the composing world, he moved from playing music to writing it. He says there's some pragmatism underpinning why ensembles often work with student or newbie composers. "When people know you as an emerging composer, they're like, 'Oh, let's commission this guy to write an opener for our season since we don't have to pay him very much," Puts says.
When he collected his doctorate and formally hung out his shingle as a composer, he found that workwise it was easier being an emerging artist than one who has, well, emerged. Some significant works were written during this time, including a couple of symphonies and the chamber pieces Credo for the Miró Quartet and Arcana for the string sextet Concertante, but let's just say his phone wasn't ringing quite so often.
If composing jobs were hit or miss, teaching composition brought consistency to his work week. He taught composition at the University of Texas from 1995 to 2005, leaving when he married and moved to New York. He joined the Peabody Composition Department in 2008. He calls himself a "guide" as much as a teacher. "I suggest where students might go next and how to develop material," Puts says. He comes down to Baltimore for in-person classes a few times a month but calls the remote tools of Zoom coupled with an online version of Sibelius "very effective." He can live edit a student's score right from his attic.
Then came his first life-changing phone call. Dale Johnson, then the Minnesota Opera's artistic director, came up with the idea for Silent Night, inspired by the 2005 film Joyeux Noël, and rang to offer the commission to Puts. "He was always looking for new voices and liked some of my orchestral music," Puts says. "Would I like to write a grand opera in three languages with chorus? Of course, yeah, I'm not going to not do it. But I was nervous."
Puts had done little composing for voice at that point, and adding to the stress, the company matched this opera tenderfoot with veteran librettist Mark Campbell. Was Puts ready for this? The film and opera present a fictionalized telling of a real wartime event, a spontaneous Christmas truce in 1914 when French, British, and German troops emerged from the trenches to fraternize in no-man's-land. They raised holiday toasts, made music (his score includes bagpipe and harmonica), and even played soccer. Every general's nightmare, it shouldn't be a spoiler to say this impromptu ceasefire is soon snuffed out. The soldiers return to the regularly scheduled business of killing one another.
Puts calls himself a linear composer: You start at the beginning of a work and dutifully compose your way to curtain fall—no jumping ahead to write a climax or showstopping aria. "I feel like if I'm excited by the journey and I'm surprised by what comes next, then the audience will be as well," Puts says. I step over to the piano and clumsily tap out the three-note riff, C#, E, F#, at the heart of one of the opera's moving arias: A French lieutenant singing from his muddy trench, dreaming of his wife and yet unseen newborn while compiling a list of his men killed in battle. Puts takes over, expanding the simple phrase with lush chords and phrases that build into a deep poignancy.
Image credit: David White
Critics swooned when Silent Night hit the stage: "Dazzling," "gripping," "displaying versatility of style and cutting straight to the heart." Since its sold-out debut run, the opera has been staged more than 20 times, here and abroad. (It comes to the Met in the 2026-27 season.) Two more Puts opera commissions followed: The Manchurian Candidate, a Cold War thriller (a 1960s film version starred Frank Sinatra), and Elizabeth Cree, a London murder mystery in the Jack-the-Ripper era. The Hours was his own making. Well, sort of. He cornered acclaimed soprano Renée Fleming, a fellow Eastman alum often described as "the voice of her generation," at a party and made her a proposition: If he wrote another opera, would she sing in it? (The pair had worked together earlier on a Puts oratorio based on the letters of artist Georgia O'Keeffe.) Not only did she say yes, but she also gave him the subject.
"I think she came up with The Hours as a possibility because she had just gotten together with Julianne Moore for another project," Puts says. (Moore had starred in the film, alongside Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman.)
With a libretto by Greg Pierce, the opera depicts three women in different time periods connected by Virginia Woolf's stream of consciousness masterwork, Mrs. Dalloway. First is Woolf herself in the early 1920s—battling inner demons while struggling to write the novel. (Kidman won an Oscar portraying Woolf behind a prosthetic nose.) Then there's a weary American housewife in midcentury LA who's reading Dalloway while concluding that her life as a suburban mom was "someone else's heaven." Finally, there's an editor in 1990s New York (she's nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway) planning a party for her ex-lover, a noted poet dying of AIDS.
The story was movingly told on the page (the Michael Cunningham novel won a Pulitzer) and brought star-power to the screen. What could hoary old opera bring to this well-raked dramatic ground? Singing, of course. Harmony. Fleming was joined by soprano Kelli O'Hara and DiDonato in the lead roles. "The three can sing at the same time and it's like time travel," Puts says. "I just found the whole thing fascinating because you can't do that in a film. You can't have Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore speaking their lines at the same time, but singing harmony works."
While opera has been good to him, Puts doesn't want to be pigeonholed. He has written four symphonies and numerous concertos and chamber pieces. While Puts continues to compose such "abstract" works, there has been a creative shift toward more vocal works based on or inspired by the writings of others. Disproportionately, so far, these words have been women's. Puts isn't quite sure why, suggesting only that "the female protagonist is usually more compelling … their situations more complicated."
Does he have a signature sound? What makes something Putsian? "People are always talking about sweeping melodies and rich harmonies, and so I guess there's that," he says. "There's definitely a thread of American Romanticism in my music." He stands on the sonic shoulders of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber. "Polystylism" fits the descriptor bill as well: minimalism still lurks in some works, his marimba concerto nods to Mozart, and Contact ends with a rousing Bulgarian folk song.
His pieces have also been described as "cinematic," which begs the question if work for Hollywood is in the offing. Could he be the next John Williams? (Or Philip Glass for that matter, the composer of The Hours soundtrack.) "Oh, I would like to do a soundtrack, and there's a director who keeps saying he wants me to do a score, but I don't think the film has been produced yet," Puts says. "I'm hoping that there'll be somebody who hears my music and says that's the sound they want for a film."
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What drives him to write music? To clamber up to his attic and face the keyboard and screen? That hasn't changed since his freshman year at Eastman. "What really motivates me more than anything is people playing my music," he says. Recordings can help keep his music alive and relevant, and his website lists over 30 different ones that are available.
In the end, prizes are great and commissions help pay the bills. And how cool would it be to one day get a call from the Associated Press asking about his Oscar-winning soundtrack? But he gets excitement and delight from simply hearing his music in unexpected places—such as the Facebook video he stumbled across of some students in Spain playing one of his trios on marimba, violin, and clarinet. "It was amazing," Puts says. "How did they find it? It was just the coolest."
"When I'm writing music, I'm hoping that it will be meaningful to people and people will want to play it," Puts adds. "I never take that for granted."
Brennen Jensen is a senior writer for Johns Hopkins Magazine
Posted in Arts+Culture
Tagged opera, classical music, contemporary composers
