When a fire broke out at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in 2019, the British composer Julian Anderson was devastated.
“Seeing a precise and beautiful and precious structure like that dissolving almost into the fire was very, very traumatizing,” he said in an interview.
Anderson soon began channeling some of his despondence into “Litanies,” a 25-minute meditation for cello and orchestra. In the second movement, a series of chords emerges then melts away, echoing the disaster.
On Monday, “Litanies” won the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, one of contemporary music’s most prestigious prizes. The Grawemeyer, which is administered and was announced by the University of Louisville in Kentucky, comes with $100,000.
In choosing Anderson, 55, the prize paid homage to a prolific composer known for his vivid imagination. His music draws on a variety of traditions — blending folk, for example, with more modern sounds. He has won commissions from top orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The composer Marc Satterwhite, who directs the award, praised “Litanies” for its exploration of “virtually every sound a cello and orchestra can make together.” Anderson wrote the piece for the cellist Alban Gerhardt, who premiered the work in 2020 with the National Orchestra of France.
“It spans a vast emotional range and is constantly inventive,” Satterwhite said in a statement, “but always toward an expressive end, never for the sake of novelty.”
Anderson completed “Litanies” in 2019, several months after the fire and a year after the death of his close friend Oliver Knussen, the influential composer and conductor.
Knussen’s death also influenced the work. “There is a sense of time running out,” Anderson said of a cadenza that gradually dissipates.
The Grawemeyer has been awarded to some of the most important modern composers, including Gyorgy Ligeti, John Adams, Tan Dun, Thomas Adès, Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Olga Neuwirth and Esa-Pekka Salonen, among others. Anderson will accept the prize in Louisville in the spring.
Anderson, a professor of composition and composer-in-residence at Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, said that he hoped the award would help bring attention to the importance of contemporary music and live performance.
“There is nothing that replaces the live experience,” he said. “The joy, the pleasure, the revelation, even, of hearing wonderful music played actually in the room with you, not just on a computer screen with headphones.”
