Yehudi Wyner, a former visiting professor at Cornell, has won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for music.

It is the second consecutive Pulitzer for a Cornell-affiliated composer. Steven Stucky, the Given Foundation Professor of Music, won in 2005 for his Second Concerto for Orchestra.

Wyner was named by the Pulitzer committee for his piano concerto "Chiavi in mano," a piece commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and premiered by soloist Robert Levin and the BSO in February 2005.

Wyner taught in Cornell's Department of Music in 1986 while his wife, Cornell alumna Susan Davenny Wyner, directed the Cornell University Chorus and taught voice.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1999 for his "Horntrio." His other honors include election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999 and the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society's Elise Stoeger Award in 1998 for his lifetime contribution to chamber music.

He is currently the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University. He has also been a frequent visiting professor at Harvard University, was on Tanglewood Music Center's chamber music faculty from 1975 to 1997 and was head of the composition faculty at Yale prior to his brief Cornell stint.