[3][6] Some of her work during this period was written for her husband, violinist Joseph Zwilich, who played in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera.
[3] He died in 1979, after which Taaffe Zwilich refocused her compositional efforts on "communicating more directly with performers and listeners," softening her somewhat harsh, jagged style.
[3] It won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize,[3] after which her popularity and income from commissions ensured that she could devote herself to composing full-time.
[8] She has received a number of other honors, including the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and four Grammy nominations.
[3] She has been professor at Florida State University, and has served for many years on the advisory panel of the BMI Foundation, Inc.
[3][6] A 2012 recording of Taaffe Zwilich's Concerto for Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra, performed by Chamber Music Northwest with clarinetist David Shifrin, was selected by the Library of Congress in 2023 for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
"[9][10] Taaffe Zwilich's compositional style is marked by an obsession with "the idea of generating an entire work – large-scale structure, melodic and harmonic language, and developmental processes – from its initial motives.