PHILADELPHIA — Richard Wernick, 91, of Haverford, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, acclaimed conductor, retired Irving Fine Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, and former consultant to conductor Ricardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, died Friday of age-associated decline at his home.

Professor Wernick was prolific and celebrated as a composer. He wrote hundreds of scores over six decades and appeared on more than a dozen records, and his Visions of Terror and Wonder for a mezzo-soprano and orchestra won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for music. In 1991, his String Quartet No. 4 made him the first two-time winner of the Kennedy Center’s Friedheim Award for new American music.

“Wernick’s orchestral music has power and brilliance, an emphasis on register, space, and scale,” Lesley Valdes, former Inquirer classical music critic, said in 1990.

His Violin Concerto tied for first place in the 1986 Friedheim Award competition, and former Inquirer music critic Daniel Webster described it as “a tightly organized piece in which thematic ideas, harmonic gestures, and subtly organized instrumental colors provide a panorama against which the virtuoso violin part grows, takes a theatrical stance, and then plunges toward a heroic conclusion.”

A judge at that competition told Webster: “Wernick’s piece demands to be heard. That is a measure of great music.” His Piano Concerto finished second in the Friedheim competition in 1992.

Professor Wernick was named the 2006 Composer of the Year by the Classical Recording Foundation, and he earned grants, fellowships, and other awards from the Delaware Symphony Orchestra, and the Ford, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Naumburg Foundations.

For him, personal prestige came second to appreciating the music. “This should be a celebration, not a competition,” he told Webster after his 1991 Friedheim award. “Our society puts so little value on the arts that this prize should recognize the art more than the person. Music wins the prize in this event.”

He was composer in residence for the Philadelphia Orchestra for several years in the 1980s and earned high-profile commissions from the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, National Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, National Endowment for the Arts, and other groups. His work has been performed at the Academy of Music, Curtis Institute, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Ravenna Festival in Italy, Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, and elsewhere around the world.

He told The Inquirer in the 1980s and ’90s that his work was “rhythmically challenging” and that he often used inspirational quotes, religious text, and personal experience to “shape the material.” He poured his own emotions into his work, his son Adam said, because music was his deepest form of expression.

“I look back over my music, and I can see the differences as time goes on,” Professor Wernick said in 1991. “But I see a similarity within all my music. This evolution is an important process.”

He was a consultant on contemporary American music to the Philadelphia Orchestra from 1983 to ’89 and then special adviser to Muti until 1993. He was affable with a hearty laugh and spoke comfortably at conferences, seminars, workshops, and public appearances before performances. “Muti said he found Wernick a musician he could respect and trust,” Webster said in 1991.

He studied with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts in the 1950s and went on to conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra, his own Penn Contemporary Players, and other ensembles. He was recruited from the University of Chicago to Penn in 1968 by fellow composer George Crumb and was the Irving Fine Professor of Music, music department chairman, Magnin Professor of Humanities, and a mentor to student composers until his retirement in 1996.

He was especially active with young composers at what is now the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance in Israel. “He was hands-on and tough, and loved when his composing students became colleagues,” his son said.

Earlier, he was music director of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and then music professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo and the University of Chicago. He also studied at Mills College in California and spent much of the 1950s and early ’60s writing music for theater, film, TV, and dance productions.

“I was originally headed for electrical engineering,” he told Bruce Duffie of Chicago’s WNIB radio in a 1993 interview on kcstudio.com. “I’m glad I’m not an electrical engineer. I’m very glad I stuck it out. It’s been a wonderfully exciting and rewarding existence.”

Richard Frank Wernick was born Jan. 16, 1934, in Newton, Mass., about 10 miles west of Boston. He played piano and clarinet as a boy, and started composing music as a teenager. He studied with several maestros in high school and college, and earned a bachelor’s degree in music at nearby Brandeis University.

He met bassoon student Beatrice Messina at Tanglewood, and they married in 1956, and had sons Lew, Adam, and Peter. Peter died in 1986.

Wernick was a lifelong Boston Red Sox baseball fan. Later, he adopted the Phillies as his second-favorite team.

He was an avid reader, and his home was full of history books and biographies. He and his wife lived for nearly 40 years in Media before moving to the Quadrangle in Haverford in 2007.

They also built a home in Vermont and went there often to garden, hike, consume ice cream and root beer, work quietly, and take in the music at local festivals. “He was such a dynamic, forceful, humorous, vibrant, impossible human being,” his son Adam said. His son Lew said: “He was a man of very high standards and great integrity in both his professional and personal life.”

In addition to his wife and sons, Wernick is survived by five granddaughters, a great-granddaughter, and other relatives.

A private service and celebration of his life are to be held later.

Donations in his name may be made to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Box 781352, Philadelphia, Pa. 19178.

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