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By Karen Sharpe
 Six years ago, Ray Lustig ’94 was about to give up on his hope of becoming a composer. Rejected by all six of the graduate music schools and conservatories to which he had applied, he considered abandoning a lifelong dream.
Lustig had spent seven years working in the biology research laboratories of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Columbia University in New York City—devoting most of his spare time to composing, assembling a portfolio of works and dreaming of a life in music.
In the wake of those half-dozen rejections, Lustig found it hard to persevere. But with the encouragement of his wife, and the guidance and advice of colleagues in the arts, Lustig revamped his portfolio and applied again—to 17 institutions this time. He was accepted at all of them.
Now, four years into a Ph.D. program at the Juilliard School in New York, Lustig has had his ambitions rewarded and validated. In early 2007, he won the Rudolf Nissim Prize from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers for his work, Unstuck.
A 17-minute piece for a large ensemble, the composition was selected from among 300 submissions. Lustig received a $5,000 prize with the award.
“I thought it was a mistake when I found out,” Lustig says. “Some of the runners-up are really interesting composers who are already doing quite well in their careers.”
Music has always been Lustig’s first love, even at Holy Cross, where he had also studied biomedical science. And, though the College’s music program did not include much composition, Lustig credits much of his success at Juilliard to his undergraduate studies.
“I’m incredibly grateful to my preparation at Holy Cross,” Lustig says. “My writing is very strong, and I credit my teachers there for that foundation.”
The recognition that Unstuck has recognized is especially poignant to Lustig, as it represents more than a decade of introspection and creative inspiration following the slow decline of his grandparents as they suffered with Alzheimer’s disease.
“This piece has been cooking since my Holy Cross days and even before,” he says. “Much of my youth was spent in nursing homes, visiting with my grandparents. I’ve learned how fragile consciousness is. It was very poignant for me to think of continuity and memory loss.”
The piece’s title comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, which Lustig read while at Holy Cross.
“The main character is ‘unstuck in time’ and lives in various periods, and some of them are fantastic or horrible—others are bizarre, others are on the edge of science fiction,” Lustig says. “When I read the novel I thought of someone who had dementia or trauma-induced dementia. The ‘unstuck time’ device really stuck with me. I tried to capture that idea of being out of context yet beautiful and create some sort of symphonic sculpture of the experience.”
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