Yehudi Wyner, who taught music here for 18 years before retiring in 2005, won a Pulitzer Prize April 16 for a composition dedicated to a lifetime of toil and triumph at the piano.David M. Oshinsky, Ph.D '71, a professor at the University of Texas, also nabbed a Pulitzer that day for his landmark study of the polio virus in America.

This is the second Pulitzer in as many years for the history department and, according to the University, the fifth prize won by American history graduates and professors. Prof. David Hackett Fischer's book, Washington Crossing, won the prize last year.

Like most winners, Oshinsky and Wyner learned about the award, given annually at Columbia University, from friends or colleagues via telephone.

It was about 1:30 a.m. at a farmhouse in Tuscany when Wyner's phone started squealing. Wyner, 77, and his wife Susan Davenny-Wyner, a conductor, stood in the doorway, groping frantically for their keys. They were rushing because of a sound far more urgent than a telephone ring: the grunting of at least one wild boar.

Once safely inside, Wyner learned of the award from an ecstatic Robert Levin, the pianist and Harvard professor who performed his 20-minute concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra last spring.

"It was quite extraordinary," Wyner said of winning. "There's nowhere to go above this."

Speaking from his Medford home Friday, Wyner explained the title of his composition, "Chiavi in Mano" or "Keys in Hand."

In Italy, he said, a realtor or car salesman might tell you, "chiavi in mano," after closing the deal.

"Of course, the bank owns it still," he said. "But, in effect, you're free to use the car or move into the house. It's yours."

It's also a pun, Wyner said, referring to the keys of a piano. While the concerto is difficult to play, "It lays very much under the hands."

"It's written by a pianist, for a pianist," Wyner said, referring to Levin.

Wyner was born in Calgary, Alberta in 1929 but grew up in New York City. His father, Lazar Weiner, a Ukrainian immigrant, was probably the most famous composer of Yiddish art songs of his time. Wyner said his family background made his entrance into music just about inevitable.

"I was programmed into music from birth," he said. "Both my parents felt there was a lot riding on it."

As a small child, Wyner would practice on the piano for two or three hours each day. As he grew, practice time increased. To free up time for music, his private Manhattan school, while rigorous, did not bother teaching him science or math.

"It was a very intense and strictly directed professional track," he said.

In spite of his disciplined upbringing, Wyner was able to squeeze in a few games of stickball with friends, which he described as "the terror of my parents."

"They figured I would jam my hands," he said. "And I did jam my hands. But they're still working."

Wyner went on to study music at the Julliard School and then assume teaching positions at Harvard, Yale and finally Brandeis, where he arrived in 1988.

"I had a tremendously fruitful time in many ways," he said of his teaching experience here. "I thoroughly enjoyed it on two levels in particular. One was guiding graduate students in really serious high level work. The other was the business of giving music appreciation."

Wyner said his music appreciation course, which many enrolled in to fulfill their creative arts requirement, drew over 100 students.

"I loved it because I could perform a lot rather than making it a course filled with factoids and meaningless theoretical ideas," he said. "I tried to get them to love what they were hearing."

Oshinsky, who won the history Pulitzer for Polio: An American Story, did not respond to an e-mail message last week. Paul Jankowski, the chair of the history department, said he was "delighted" to learn that the former Ph.D. student had garnered the department another award.

"This award, coming on top of others that other graduates or faculty in the same program have won for work in widely differing domains, is another reminder of how much Brandeis has to gain from investing in high-quality graduate programs such as this one," Jankowski said.

A two-time Guggenheim fellow and a member of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, Wyner is now working on a violin concerto for Daniel Stepner (MUS), a member of the Brandeis-based Lydian String Quartet.

"He says it is progressing nicely, though in characteristic fashion, he won't show it to me until it is in semifinal state. I am very excited about it," Stepner said.

Stepner, who has known Wyner for 40 years, called his Pulitzer "long overdue."

"His music has always seemed special to me-accessible, quirky, sometimes thorny, often obstreperous, intensely lyrical and sometimes searingly tragic," he said. "He hasn't gotten certain sorts of attention because he hasn't subscribed to certain favored orthodoxies."

Instead, it seems, Wyner's been too busy entertaining his grandchildren.

"I wrote a whole song, with a lot verses, and it's all about the butt," he said.

The song is called "The Button at the Bottom of the Butt."

"I'm not sure it's suitable for all children," he said.

Well, what do his grandchildren think?

"Oh, they get hysterical.