Mr. Spratlan, whose lengthy street to the Pulitzer and the premiere additionally included his self-financing the live performance that led to the prize, died on Feb. 9 at a hospice middle in Mount Laurel, N.J. He was 82. His spouse, Melinda (Kessler) Spratlan, stated the trigger was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Spratlan, who taught at Amherst School in Massachusetts for 36 years, composed works for big ensembles and small ones, in addition to solo items. He even invented an instrument, which he referred to as the terpsiptomaton and which included steel coils and rods, piano strings and ball bearings.
“When a secret is depressed, the ball bearings are launched and fall, hitting the rods and the piano strings,” The Boston Globe defined in 1980. Amherst journal described it as “a cross between a harpsichord and a pinball machine.”
Each the instrument and a chunk he composed for it, “Coils,” got their world premiere in a live performance in Amherst in 1980. The instrument appears to not have caught on, however the effort confirmed Mr. Spratlan’s penchant for whimsy in his works.
Within the chamber piece “When Crows Collect” (1986), which was impressed partly by the arrival of a throng of crows outdoors his studio window in Massachusetts, he had the musicians approximate wintry winds and finish with, as Mr. Tommasini put it in The Instances, “what may very well be referred to as the ‘Crow Squawk Toccata.’” In 2002, Allan Kozinn of The Instances described one other chamber piece, “Zoom,” this manner:
“He begins by having the gamers alternate sharp, loud chordal bursts with all method of breathy vocalizations, together with sighs, heavy respiratory, gasping and panting. Ultimately the musical content material sweeps away the sound results, solely to profession between slidey modernist textures and fleeting hints of big-band jazz. A contact of what appears to be the affect of Frank Zappa streams by means of the final two actions as effectively, and from there it’s a brief step to cartoonish sound results.”
