The rules changes governing the eligibility of various types of music for the Pulitzer Prize may be controversial among academics and classical purists, but Howard Reich says that the change is nothing more than a long-overdue acknowledgement that American music is more than Europe-Lite. “More than six decades after the Pulitzer Board began giving prizes for music, in other words, it has come to recognize that American music is not simply European symphonic art penned by American composers in its thrall. On the contrary… the folkloric roots of jazz, blues, gospel and the like born of oral tradition and originated not in the salons of Vienna and Paris but in the fields of Africa and the islands of the Caribbean.”