Composer

There are unexpected perks that can come with receiving a Pulitzer Prize, as composer Kevin Puts discovered last Tuesday. "It was 'Kevin Puts Day' here," he said by phone from his home in Yonkers, N.Y. "There was a nice ceremony with the mayor. I got a plaque. I never had a day named after me. " Puts, a Peabody Institute faculty member since 2006, won the Pulitzer for "Silent Night," an opera about the unauthorized Christmas truce in the midst of World War I, when troops from both sides of the trenches emerged to celebrate Christmas together before the killing resumed.

Betty G. Hocker, a retired Baltimore opera singer and composer who wrote the "Fort McHenry March" at the time of the nation's bicentennial, died Saturday of complications from dementia at Stella Maris Hospice. The longtime Roland Park resident was 101. The daughter of a businessman and a homemaker, Sara Elizabeth "Betty" Gumpper was born into a musical family in Butler, Pa. Her father played the banjo and piano and had a small band, while her mother also played the piano and sang.

As the Washington Capitals sat in the dressing room at their Arlington, Va., practice facility ahead of a flight to Boston for a final showdown with the Boston Bruins in this Eastern Conference quarterfinal series, the mood was noticeably loose. Players lobbed well-intended jabs at one another, exchanged jokes with reporters and seemed relaxed to the point that an uninformed observer might not have believed the team will be fighting to keep its season alive tonight in Game 7 at TDGarden.

Kevin Puts, a composer who teaches at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, won the Pulitzer Prize in music Monday for his first opera. Puts, a member of the Peabody faculty since 2006, was honored for "Silent Night," a two-act work commissioned by the Minnesota Opera. "I'm still in a state of shock, and I'm trying to get my bearings," the composer said from Minneapolis, where "Silent Night" premiered in November. "It is an enormous thrill. " The opera was inspired by the 2005 film "Joyeux Noel," about the unofficial cease-fire that emerged spontaneously during Christmas 1914, when British, French and German troops socialized during a brief respite before the trench warfare resumed.

St. Anne's Church in Annapolis was filled last weekend with the miraculous sound of the Annapolis Chorale Chamber Chorus, joined by the Annapolis Chamber Orchestra and six guest soloists for two great performances of Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B-minor. This performance of Bach's medley of masterworks was the first by Live Arts Maryland music director J. Ernest Green and his chorus, lending the added luster reflected by their joint discovery of its musical secrets. Regarded as a supreme achievement by music scholars, Bach's Mass is also an enigma, a Latin work composed by the Protestant "Cantor of Leipzig," and finished in the last year of his life.

The Old Brick Church has earned that name during its 200-year history. That anniversary is being observed by Christ Episcopal Church in Columbia, whose present building was constructed in 1993 and hence qualifies as an architectural newcomer. Such an event calls for music, which will be supplied by the Columbia Pro Cantare performing the world premiere of Howard County composer Tom Benjamin 's "Old Brick Oratorio" Saturday, Oct. 15 at 8 p.m. The composition packs a lot of musical and historical material into its approximately 60-minute running time.

Born 200 years ago on Oct. 22, Franz Liszt changed music history. Even if the Hungarian-born pianist/composer had not done so, people would probably still remember him, if only for his romances. There was the dancer, Lola, who got so mad when Liszt tired of her that she followed him from city to city, finally crashing a banquet given in his honor and boogieing on a table in front of a startled crowd. And Olga, who, likewise faced with Liszt's waning affections, disguised herself as a gardener and burst into his villa ready to stab him. She settled for one more bout of lovemaking that night, but soon hounded him again, this time with a revolver and poison.

Robert Schumann heard so much music in his head, he felt compelled to compose. "I cannot help it," he wrote to his wife, Clara, "and should like to sing myself to death, like a nightingale. " When he died at the age of 46 in an asylum, the only sounds he made were unintelligible to Clara and the doctors. It was a pathetic end to one of the greatest figures of 19th-century German Romanticism. This weekend, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will examine Schumann's troubled mind in an "Off the Cuff" presentation led by music director Marin Alsop.

Live Arts Maryland's season-closing production of "The Music Man" at Maryland Hall brought a pre-World War I small town to life with skilled musical direction and several memorable vocal performances. Music director J. Ernest Green led the Annapolis Chorale, Annapolis Chamber Orchestra and cast members in the April 29-30 weekend performances of the musical, set in 1912, which sees a traveling salesman/con man change his ways. Composer-lyricist Meredith Willson's musical tale won the 1958 Tony Award for best musical, somehow besting Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" that year to place Willson at the top of Broadway composers.

Robert F. Twynham, the long-serving organist and music director at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Mary Our Queen who created a popular Sunday musical series, died of a gastric obstruction March 23 at his Reservoir Hill home. He was 80. Though deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, he led the musical program at the cathedral for 37 years. News articles said he served under six rectors and three archbishops, two of them cardinals. He established a much-praised choral department, composed several major sacred works and a library of music for weekly worship, presented a long-running weekly concert series and oversaw sacred music-dramas.