Tag: award announcements

Anthony Davis Wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music

The two sides of a Pulitzer Prize medal awarded in 1917.

Anthony Davis’s opera The Central Park Five has been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The annually awarded $15,000 prize is for a distinguished musical composition by an American that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the previous year. The opera, featuring a libretto by Richard Wesley, received a New Music USA grant for commission fees in 2015 and received its premiere on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera. It is described in the Pulitzer citation as “a courageous operatic work, marked by powerful vocal writing and sensitive orchestration, that skillfully transforms a notorious example of contemporary injustice into something empathetic and hopeful.”

“That’s pretty far out!” exclaimed Davis (b. 1951) when reached by telephone minutes after the award was announced. “I never thought I’d get a Pulitzer for a piece with Trump on the toilet. I’m thrilled and excited. I’d like to thank Long Beach Opera and all the people involved with the production. It was such an incredible project.”

The announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, originally scheduled for April 20 in the Columbia University Journalism Building but delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was made online by Pulitzer Prize Administrator Dana Canedy from her living room via a stream posted on the Pulitzer website and on YouTube.

Also nominated as finalists for the 2020 music prize were: Sky, a violin concerto by Michael Torke (b. 1961), premiered on January 5, 2019, in Troy, N.Y. by Tess Lark with the Albany Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller, which is described in the jury citation as “a virtuosic work of astonishing beauty, expert pacing and generous optimism”; and and all the days were purple by Alex Weiser (b. 1989), a song cycle for voice, piano, percussion and string trio, based on poems in Yiddish and English, released on April 12, 2019 by Cantaloupe Music, which is described in the citation as “a meditative and deeply spiritual work whose unexpected musical language is arresting and directly emotional.”

“Recognition is so hard to come by these days so I feel very grateful for the support,” said Michael Torke. “I owe such a debt to Tessa Lark, who guided me in the Bluegrass style and who performed it so magnificently.”

“It’s such an honor to have my work acknowledged in this way,” added Alex Weiser. “It’s humbling to be mentioned alongside the great artists recognized by the Pulitzer Prize, many of whom are heroes of mine.”

The jury for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Music was: William C. Banfield (Chair), Professor of Liberal Arts & Africana Studies, Music and Society, Berklee College of Music; Jon Batiste, Bandleader/Musician, New York City; David Bloom, Conductor, Co-Artistic Director, Contemporaneous; Kevin Puts, Professor of Composition, Peabody Institute and Johns Hopkins University, and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Music (for his opera Silent Night); and William Trafka, Former Director of Music, St. Bartholomew’s Church, New York City.

In addition, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Drama was awarded to the musical A String Loop featuring music, book, and lyrics by Michael R. Jackson. One of the other finalists for that award was another musical, Soft Power, featuring book and lyrics by David Henry Hwang and music by Jeanine Tesori.

Lei Liang Wins 2020 Grawemeyer Award for Climate Change-Inspired Piece

An AAPI man posing in front of a wooden background

Chinese-American composer Lei Liang has won the 2020 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for an orchestral work that evokes the threat posed by climate change and the opportunity it offers for redemption. Boston Modern Orchestra Project commissioned the winning piece, A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams, which premiered in 2018 in Boston’s Jordan Hall with Gil Rose conducting. Recipients of the 2020 Grawemeyer Awards are being named this week pending formal approval by university trustees. The annual $100,000 prizes reward outstanding ideas in music, world order, psychology, education and religion. Winners will visit Louisville in April to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

“Liang’s piece, which explores a huge range of emotions and ends with both hope and ambiguity, has a forceful, convincing arc and wonderful orchestral colors,” said Marc Satterwhite, music award director. “Like some of our other winners, he challenges people inside and outside the field of music to ponder important things, even when it’s uncomfortable to do so.”

“I wanted to convey the importance of preserving our landscapes, both physically and spiritually.”

“The world we live in today is dangerous,” explained Liang. “Our very existence is threatened by global warming, which is causing violent disruptions to the living things on our planet and being made worse by human irresponsibility. When creating the work, I wanted to convey the importance of preserving our landscapes, both physically and spiritually, to sustain a place where we and our children can belong.”

Lei Liang

2020 Grawemeyer Award winning composer Lei Liang (Photo by Alex Matthews, courtesy University of Louisville.)

Lei Liang (b. 1972) is a music professor at University of California, San Diego, and research-artist-in-residence at Qualcomm Institute, the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. He has composed more than 100 works, including pieces addressing other contemporary social issues such as human trafficking and gun violence. Xiaoxiang, his concerto for saxophone and orchestra, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015.

Schott Music, a company founded in 1770 in Germany now with offices worldwide, publishes all of Liang’s compositions. In 2018, BMOP/sound record label released a recording of his Grawemeyer-winning piece which also includes Xiaoxiang. Click here to listen to a complete recording of A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams and to look at a perusal copy of the full orchestral score.


Additional comments by Lei Liang on the inspiration for A Thousand Mountains, a Million Streams

“I came across the writings and landscape paintings of Huang Binhong and fell in love.”

A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams is a musical landscape that I painted with a sonic brush. The journey of this work started about 25 years ago when I was a college freshman. While immersed in the study of Chinese shanshui (mountain-stream, or landscape) paintings, I came across the writings and landscape paintings of Huang Binhong (1865-1955) and fell in love. I hand-copied Huang Binhong’s essays, visited Hangzhou, China, where he had his last residence, and went to museums to search for his original paintings. Since those first discoveries, his paintings have never ceased to inspire me.

In 2009, I met the Berkeley-based scholar and connoisseur Jung Ying Tsao (1929-2011). A particular album in Mr. Tsao’s collection caught my attention. It was painted by Huang Binhong in 1952, when he was nearly blind from cataracts. The master painter (then aged 87) continued to paint in blindness, and even created some of his most magical works during that time. It is an inner landscape, the magical projection of an internal vision. This orchestra piece is the culmination of a project that took shape over several years, and developed over several stages, mainly during my research residency at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego. The first phase, Hearing Landscapes, was the sonification of a Chinese traditional landscape painting by Huang Binhong (1865-1955), painted during a time when the artist was blind (in 1953).

From 2014 to 2016, I had a further opportunity to continue my research into Huang Binhong when I became the composer-in-residence at California Institute of Information Technology (Calit2) and Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego. With a group of scientists, we created a collaborative project that sought to conserve and explore Huang Binhong’s art through creative processes in musical composition and data visualization. Through the courtesy of Elna Tsao and with the support from the Mozhai Foundation, Huang’s album leaves were loaned to us, captured digitally, then reconstructed for high-resolution projection, revealing to viewers details of the work that have never been seen before. By using audio software technology, the intricate world hidden within the paintings’ brushstrokes are rendered sonically in an immersive space. Our project enables a viewer to fly through this painting, as if riding on a drone, and draws us into the landscape of microscopic elements – a fiber in the rice paper, the trace left by a single hair in the brush.

“Around the same time as China’s Cultural Revolution, the world was just starting to experience the catastrophic effect of what we would come to call global warming.”

In the 1950s, the cultural-political landscape in China began to change dramatically. Soon, China was to witness and undergo its most violent self-destruction – the Cultural Revolution – aiming at the annihilation of its own heritage through unprecedented brutality against its people. Around the same time, the world was just starting to experience the catastrophic effect of what we would come to call global warming. The harrowing effects of this era, induced by the emission of greenhouse gases, began to cause what we now know is the inevitable consequences of climate change: the sea will rise, the icecaps will melt, cities will flood, and whole species will be wiped out. The landscape we inhabit will forever change.

In 1952, in a darkness both literal and metaphoric, the blind Huang Binhong envisioned a luminous landscape that seemed to arise out of the shredded fragments and ashes. It transcended the brutal reality, offering a glimpse of a landscape to come, perhaps a place our children can call home.


Below is a link to a documentary, Deriving Worlds, about the research Liang conducted with scientists and sound engineers.

Deriving Worlds from Keita Funakawa on Vimeo.

The Grammys You Care About Will Not All Be Televised

A grammy award

Aside from the televised presentations during last night’s 61st Annual Grammy Awards ceremony (which you can still relive highlights from on the CBS website), The Recording Academy handed out many other awards yesterday at Los Angeles’s Staples Center. Here are some of the ones we are most excited about.

Recordings of works by living American composers triumphed over older repertoire in the Best Opera, Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Instrumental Solo, Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance, and Best Classical Compendium categories.

Terrence Blanchard’s composition Blut Und Boden (Blood and Soil), which is included in the soundtrack for the 2018 Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman, was awarded Best Instrumental Composition, winning over compositions by Alexandre Desplat, Jeremy Kittel, and Alan Silvestri, as well as a co-composition by John Powell and John Williams. Aaron Jay Kernis fetched the award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his Violin Concerto, which was released by Onyx Classics in a performance by James Ehnes with the Seattle Symphony under the direction of Ludovic Morlot, beating out work by Du Yun, Missy Mazzoli, Jake Heggie, and Mason Bates.  The Santa Fe Opera recording of Bates’s nominated composition, the opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, did however capture the award for Best Opera Recording, while Ehnes’s performance of Kernis’s concerto earned him the Best Classical Instrumental Solo accolade over soloists who had mostly recorded older repertoire. (Apart from Craig Morris, who was nominated for his rendition of Philip Glass’s early Piece in the Shape of a Square arranged for multi-tracked trumpets, the other nominees were soloists who had recorded Biber, Bruch, and Bartók.) Recordings of works by living American composers also triumphed over older repertoire in the Best Choral Performance and Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance categories. The winners were: innova’s recording of Lansing McLoskey’s Zealot Canticles performed by The Crossing under the direction of Donald Nally; and Nonesuch’s recording of Laurie Anderson’s Landfall performed by the Kronos Quartet.

Best Classical Compendium, a relatively recent Grammy category (established in 2013), was awarded to a JoAnn Falletta/London Symphony Orchestra recording on Naxos American Classics devoted exclusively to the music of Kenneth Fuchs, which includes four works, each of which features a different soloist: Fuchs’s Piano Concerto performed by Jeffrey Biegel; Glacier, a concerto for electric guitar and orchestra with D. J. Sparr; Rush, a concerto for alto saxophone with Timothy McAllister; and Poems of Life, which is a setting of 12 poems by Judith G. Wolf sung by countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. And the award for Producer of the Year, Classical went to Blanton Alspaugh, whose qualifying 2018 recording credits included operas by Jake Heggie (Great Scott), Ricky Ian Gordon (The House Without a Christmas Tree), and Robert Paterson (Three Way) plus the Pentatone compendium Aspects of America, which features Carlos Kalmar-led Oregon Symphony performances of works by Samuel Barber, Kenji Bunch, Sebastian Currier, Christopher Rouse, and Sean Shepherd.

John Daversa picked up three honors for his album American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom.

Miami-based composer/arranger/trumpeter John Daversa picked up three honors for his album American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom, an album featuring DACA artists presenting Daversa’s original compositions as well as his arrangements of various standards: e.g. the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim “America,” which originally appeared in the 1957 Broadway musical West Side Story; John Philip Sousa’s classic patriotic march Stars and Stripes Forever; Woody Guthrie’s protest song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)”; and, perhaps most poignantly, Cole Porter’s 1934 “Don’t Fence Me In” (which in our current political climate takes on additional meanings not originally intended by the Montana-based cowboy poet Bob Fletcher, one of whose verses Porter bought and reworked into this song). Aside from receiving the award for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album (beating out albums by Orrin Evans, John Hollenbeck, Jim McNeely, and the Count Basie Orchestra directed by Scotty Barnhart), Daversa also beat out Regina Carter, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, and Miguel Zenón to receive the Best Improvised Jazz Solo accolade for his solo on “Don’t Fence Me In” and also was given the Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella award for his version of Stars and Stripes Forever.

The Wayne Shorter Quartet’s disc Emanon received Best Instrumental Jazz Album eking out a victory over recordings led by Tia Fuller, Fred Hersch, Brad Mehldau, and Joshua Redman. All Ashore, a Nonesuch album of nine originals performed and collectively composed by progressive bluegrass stalwarts The Punch Brothers (a quintet featuring Chris Thile) was awarded Best Folk Album; Best Bluegrass Album was given to an eponymous recording by the more traditionally oriented group The Travelin’ McCourys. All in all, awards were given out in a total of 84 categories which are all listed on The Recording Academy’s website.

2018 Paul Revere Awards for Graphic Excellence Announced

The 2018 Paul Revere Awards for Graphic Excellence were announced during the annual meeting of the Music Publishers Association at The Redbury in New York City. The awards, which were established in 1964 in honor of the first music engraving  in America, by Paul Revere, recognize publications which best exemplify high standards in music engraving, design, and utility. Among the 2018 award-winning publications, in a total of 13 award categories, were the piano-vocal scores for two operas—Michael Ching’s Buoso’s Ghost and David T. Little and Royce Vavrick’s Dog Days—as well as Yehudi Wyiner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Piano Concerto “Chiavo a Mano,” orchestral works by John Adams and Anna Clyne, wind band compositions by Richard Danielpour and Erik Morales, a saxophone quartet by Chen Yi, John Corigliano’s recent unaccompanied violin solo Stomp, three compositions by Daniel Dorff, two compositions by Fred Lerdahl, and two publications devoted to the music of William Bolcom.

The 2018 Paul Revere Award winners are:

 Cover Design Featuring Photography

First Prize
Parkway for marimba and vibraphone by Joe Locke
Marimba Productions, Inc.

Second Prize
Kalmen Opperman: A Legacy of Excellence
Carl Fischer Music

Third Prize
Clear Midnight for percussion duo by Michael Burritt
Marimba Productions, Inc.

Cover Design Featuring Graphic Elements

First Prize
Masquerade for orchestra by Anna Clyne
Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

Second Prize
Fiddle & Song: Violin, Book 1
Alfred Music

Third Prize TIE
Beyond the Starlit Skies by Peter Gjon Kadeli
Kandinsky Music

Visual Guitar Theory
Hal Leonard

Popular Music: Design in Folios

First Prize
William Bolcom Piano Works
Edward B. Marks Music Company

Second Prize
The Doors: 50th Anniversary Songbook
Alfred Music

Concert & Educational Music: Design in Folios

First Prize
Moana – The Beat of Your Heart
Hal Leonard

Second Prize TIE
Fiddle & Song: Violin, Book 1
Alfred Music

Saxophone University
Hal Leonard

Choral Music Notesetting

First Prize
Awake the Trumpet’s Lofty Sound by G. F. Handel, arr. Russell Robinson
Carl Fischer Music

Second Prize
Calm on the Listening Ear of Night by Dan Locklair
Subito Music Corporation

Third Prize
A River Glorious by James Mountain arr. Joel Raney
Hope Publishing Company

Keyboard Music Notesetting

First Prize
Sonatas, Opp. 1, 14, 28, 29 by Sergei Prokofiev
Alfred Music

Second Prize TIE
Four Impromptus by Bernard Rands
Schott Music Corporation

Cantos de España, Op. 232 by Isaac Albéniz
Alfred Music

Guitar Music Notesetting

First Prize
The Doors: 50th Anniversary Songbook
Alfred Music

Second Prize
Three Bagatelles by Fred Lerdahl
Schott Music Corporation

Piano-Vocal Notesetting

First Prize
Dog Days by David T. Little
Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

Second Prize
Buoso’s Ghost by Michael Ching
ECS Publishing

Full Scores Notesetting

First Prize
Piano Concerto “Chiavi in Mano” by Yehudi Wyner
G. Schirmer, Inc./ Associated Music Publishers

Second Prize
Billy and the Carnival by Daniel Dorff
Theodore Presser Company

Third Prize TIE
Here We Come A-Caroling by Richard Hayman
Hal Leonard

City Noir by John Adams
Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

Solos Notesetting, with accompaniment

First Prize
Duo for Violin and Piano by Kenneth Fuchs
Edward B. Marks Music Company

Second Prize
Concertino in F by Gaetano Donizetti (English horn and piano reduction)
Theodore Presser Company

Third Prize
Trombone Concerto by William Bolcom (trombone and piano reduction)
Edward B. Marks Music Company

Solos Notesetting, without accompaniment

First Prize
25 Studies in Scales and Chords by Ludwig Milde (bassoon)
Theodore Presser Company

Second Prize
Stomp by John Corigliano (violin)
G. Schirmer, Inc.

Third Prize
Six Sonatas and Partitas by J.S. Bach (violin)
Carl Fischer Music

Chamber Ensemble Notesetting

First Prize
Not Alone by Chen Yi (saxophone quartet)
Theodore Presser Company

Second Prize
Three Mysteries of Nagasaki by Daniel Dorff (violin & percussion)
Theodore Presser Company

Third Prize TIE
Desert Dusk by Daniel Dorff (alto flute & cello)
Theodore Presser Company

String Quartet No. 4 by Fred Lerdahl
Schott Music Corporation

Collated Music Notesetting

First Prize
Haywire by Erik Morales (wind band)
The FJH Music Company Inc.

Second Prize
Toward the Splendid City, Richard Danielpour (wind band)
G. Schirmer, Inc./ Associated Music Publishers

Third Prize TIE
None But The Lonely Heart, by Peter I. Tchaikovsky arr. José Serebrier (string orchestra)
Peermusic Classical

Autumn Leaves by Joseph Kosma, arr. Alfred Reed (wind band)
Keiser Southern Music

For the 2018 awards, a total of 114 submissions were evaluated by a group of four judges. Michel Léonard, the Principal Music Librarian for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and Kazue McGregor, who serves as Orchestra Librarian for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, served as the two engraving judges. Nim Ben-Reuven, a Brooklyn-based freelance art director, custom lettering artist, video producer, and installation designer, and Callie Kant, the Art Director for the women’s workwear company MM.LaFleur, served as the two graphics judges. Robert Sutherland, the Chief Librarian for The Metropolitan Opera, serves as the Coordinator of the Paul Revere Awards. Following the awards ceremony, the award-winning scores will be sent on a tour of libraries across the United States and will be gifted to the New York Library for the Performing Arts upon their return.

Pictured from left to right: Brittain Ashford, Joe Iconis, Nicole Capatasto, and Alex Ordoñez from Alfred Music

Pictured from left to right: Brittain Ashford, Joe Iconis, Nicole Capatasto, and Alex Ordoñez from Alfred Music.

Other presentations during the day included a music publishing legal update by MPA Legal Counsel James M. Kendrick, an anti=piracy update by Erich Carey from the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), a demonstration of the music notation software Dorico by Daniel Spreadbury, and a panel on social media moderated by singer-songwriter Brittain Ashford (who is also MPA’s Administrator) which featured writer/performer Joe Iconis, Nicole Capatasto of Matt Ross PR, and Alex Ordoñez from Alfred Music. As in previous years, the afternoon concluded with a cocktail hour featuring live music performed by the John Murchison Trio.

Nine Composers Receive 2018 BMI Student Composer Awards

The BMI Foundation (BMIF), in collaboration with Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), has announced the winners of the 66th annual BMI Student Composer Awards. The awards were presented to nine composers, aged 18-26, at a private ceremony held on May 14, 2018, at Three Sixty° in New York City by composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, who serves as Chair of the Student Composer Awards, BMI President and CEO and BMIF Honorary Chair Mike O’Neill, and BMI Executive Director of Classical and BMIF President Deirdre Chadwick.

Deirdre Chadwick welcomes guests to the ceremony.

“We are excited to honor these deserving and talented young composers,” said Deirdre Chadwick, Director of the Student Composer Awards. “This is only the start to what is sure to be an exciting professional journey for them all.”

The 2018 award winners are:
Katherine Balch (b. 1991): Leaf Fabric (2017) for orchestra [c. 14′]
Jonathan Cziner (b. 1991): Resonant Bells (2018) for orchestra [12′]
Saad Haddad (b. 1992): Takht (2016) for full orchestra [c. 14′]
J.P. Redmond (b. 1999): Silhouette (2017) for full orchestra [c. 7′]
Matthew Schultheis (b. 1997): Chamber Concerto (2017) for 15 Players [c. 18′]
Gabriella Smith (b. 1991): Carrot Revolution (2015) for string quartet [11′]
Ari Sussman (b. 1993):Kol Galgal (2017) for orchestra [9’25”]
Amy Thompson (b. 1994): Somewhere to Elsewhere (2018) for harp and ensemble [21′]
Miles Walter (b. 1994): Eighteen figments after Joanna Newsom, Side A (2017) for violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano [c. 11′]

Jonathan Cziner was additionally awarded the William Schuman Prize, for the score deemed most outstanding in the competition, and J.P. Redmond also received the Carlos Surinach Prize, which is awarded to the competition’s youngest winner. Plus, one additional composer, Avik Sarkar (b. 2001), received an honorable mention. The celebratory evening also featured a performance by the Emissary Quartet of the 2017 SCA-winning composition One Wish, Your Honey Lips composed by Annika K. Socolofsky.

The nine winners and honorable mention of the 2018 BMI Student Composer Awards.

The nine winners and honorable mention in the 2018 BMI Student Composer Awards.
Top row: Katherine Balch, Ari Sussman, Jonathan Cziner, Miles Walter, Avik Sarkar;
bottom row: Amy Thompson, J. P. Redmond, Gabriella Smith, Saad Haddad, and Matthew Schultheis.

Jonathan Cziner’s 2018 SCA and William Schuman Prize-winning composition Resonant Bells was selected for the 2018 New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Cone Composition Institute and will receive its world premiere performance by the NJSO under the direction of David Robertson at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium on July 14th, 2018. Saad Haddad’s 2018 SCA-winning composition Takht, which was one of the works selected for the 2017 NJSO Cone Institute, will be performed on May 25, 2018 by the Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Yang Yang at the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, China during the 2018 International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) World New Music Days.

Alexandra du Bois, Jeremy Gill, Shawn Jaeger, and David Schober served as preliminary panelists this year. The final judges were Michael Daugherty, John Harbison, Shafer Mahoney, Judith Shatin, and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is the permanent Chair of the competition. The BMI Student Composer Awards recognize superior musical compositional ability with annual educational scholarships totaling $20,000. This year, nearly 700 online applications were submitted to the competition from students throughout the Western Hemisphere, and all works were judged anonymously. BMI, in collaboration with the BMI Foundation, has awarded over 600 grants to young composers throughout the history of the competition.

Flute quartet performance during the ceremony.

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Musical America Announces 2017 Honorees

The 1912 masthead for Musical America

New music is an important focus in the 2017 Musical America awards which have just been announced. Musical America, the United States’ oldest classical music magazine (published now exclusively online with the exception of an annual International Directory of the Performing Arts), will be presenting these awards formally in a ceremony in December at Carnegie Hall. In addition, each awardee is the subject of a tribute article that will appear in the concurrently released 2017 Directory.

The 2017 award for Composer of the Year has been awarded to Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra composer-in-residence Andrew Norman who was profiled in NewMusicBox in February 2014. Previous recipients of this award, which has been given annually since 1992, include John Corigliano (its first recipient), Milton Babbitt (1996), Stephen Sondheim (2000), Lou Harrison (2002), Christopher Rouse (2009), Meredith Monk (2012), and John Luther Adams (2015). Musical America’s citation describes Norman as “among the most versatile, not to mention performed, American composers of the day, with a list of commissions that would outdistance colleagues twice his age.”

The recipient of the 2017 award for Ensemble of the Year is the four-time Grammy Award-winning new music sextet Eighth Blackbird, which has commissioned and premiered hundreds of works including Steve Reich’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet, and which this year marks its 20th anniversary. Nearly 10 years ago, NewMusicBox posted a conversation with the entire ensemble about how they got turned on to new music, along with their fellow Oberlin alumni in the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

Other 2017 awardees have also been deeply involved with contemporary music. Helsinki Philharmonic Chief Conductor and former Ensemble InterContemporain Music Director Susanna Mälkki (Conductor of the Year), a staunch new music champion whose October 2013 appearance with the Chicago Symphony (which included the local premiere of Thomas Adès’s …and all shall be well) was described in great detail by Ellen McSweeney in NewMusicBox, will make her Metropolitan Opera debut on December 1 conducting the New York premiere of her Finnish compatriot Kaija Saariajo’s L’Amour de loin. Bass-baritone Eric Owens (Vocalist of the Year) made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2008 singing the role of General Leslie Groves in John Adams and Peter Sellars’s Doctor Atomic, a role he created at the opera’s world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in 2005. He also sang the role of the Storyteller in the world premiere of Adams/Sellars’s A Flowering Tree (a role which he subsequently recorded for Nonesuch) at the New Crowned Hope Festival in Vienna as well as the title role of Elliott Goldenthal’s opera Grendel at the Los Angeles Opera. In 2008, Molly Sheridan talked with Owens about his collaborations with contemporary composers for NewMusicBox.

Finally, Musical America’s 2017 Instrumentalist of the Year, Beijing-born pianist Yuja Wang, who has championed the music of New Zealand composer John Psathas, has also been chosen as Musical America’s 2017 Artist of the Year, the highest accolade among these awards.

Wadada Leo Smith Receives $25K Mohn Career Achievement Award

Wadada sitting and leaning his head on his left hand. Photo by Maarit Kyto Harju, courtesy Braithwaite & Katz Communications.

Composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has received the Hammer Museum’s 2016 Mohn Award for Career Achievement “honoring brilliance and resilience.” The $25,000 Award was announced by the museum on August 16 and presented in conjunction with the exhibition Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, through, only, organized by Hammer curator Adam Moshayedi and Hamza Walker, director of education and associate curator, Renaissance Society.

“The jury wants to acknowledge Wadada Leo Smith’s outstanding achievements as a musician, his influential work as a teacher and a mentor for younger artists in Los Angeles, and the decades-long expansion of an inventive, complex and layered system of notation simultaneously interrogating the pictoral and the performative,” stated Juse Luis Blondet, curator, Special Initiatives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

“I’m so honored to have won this award,” said Smith.  “I’m so happy that my scores are being viewed as works of art.  That means the world to me.”

Smith, who turns 75 in December 2016, recently received a 2016 Doris Duke Artist Award and received an honorary doctorate from CalArts, where he was honored as Faculty Emeritus. He maintains an active touring and recording schedule. His latest epic recording America’s National Parks—a six-movement suite inspired by the scenic splendor, historic legacy, and political controversies of our nation’s public landscapes and featuring pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, drummer Pheeroan akLaff, and cellist Ashley Walters—will be released October 14, 2016 on Cuneiform Records.  Later this year, TUM Records will release Wadada Leo Smith: Nagwa featuring Smith with guitarists Michael Gregory Jackson, Henry Kaiser, Brandon Ross and Lamar Smith, plus Bill Laswell on electric bass, Pheeroan akLaff on drums, and Adam Rudolph on percussion. Coming on TUM in early 2017 will be Alone: Reflections and Meditations on Monk, a solo recording by Smith. Smith’s 2016 schedule includes performances at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Molde Jazz Festival, Pittsburgh International LiveJazz Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Vision Festival, Festival Suoni Per il Pipolo, Summer Stage, NYC and the premiere of his opera /cantata Rosa Parks at the FONT Festival.

In May 2012, an extensive conversation with Wadada Leo Smith was published on NewMusicBox. The entire transcript of the conversation is available here.

A conversation with Frank J. Oteri at the Affinia Gardens Hotel in New York City
December 14, 2011—11:00 a.m.
Video presentation and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu

In addition to the Mohn Award for Career Achievement, there are two other Mohn awards. Dancer and choreographer Adam Linder also received the Mohn Award for Artistic Excellence and Kenzi Shiokava received the Public Recognition Award. These three awards, which total $150,000, are among the largest art prizes dedicated to recognizing the work of emerging and under-recognized artists from the greater Los Angeles region. A jury of professional curators selected the Artistic Excellence and Career Achievement awards while the award for Public Recognition was determined by on-site voting from June 11 through August 14, 2016. The jury included: Ingrid Schaffner, curator, 57th Carnegie International, 2018, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Mika Yoshitake, associate curator, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; and Jose Luis Blondet, curator, Special Initiatives, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All three awards were once again funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn and the Mohn Family Foundation as part of Made in L.A., the Hammer’s biennial exhibition series highlighting emerging and under-recognized artists from the Los Angeles region.

(—from the press release)

Foundation for Contemporary Arts Announces 2016 Award Recipients

Jennie C. Jones and Joan La Barbara
Jennie C. Jones and Joan La Barbara

Jennie C. Jones and Joan La Barbara are among the 2016 FCA honorees.

The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA), a nonprofit arts organization founded by John Cage and Jasper Johns, has announced its 2016 awards to artists.

Composer Joan La Barbara is the latest recipient of their biennial John Cage Award. This prestigious $50,000 award was established in 1992 in honor of the late composer. The selection is made from among invited nominations. Previous recipients of the John Cage Award have primarily been composers, including Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Earle Brown, Takehisa Kosugi, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and—most recently—Phill Niblock. However, it has also been awarded to conceptual artist William Anastasi, video artist Charles Atlas, and digital artist Paul Kaiser.

In this NewMusicBox interview from 2006 (you can read the entire transcript here), La Barbara acknowledged that she has always followed advice that John Cage once gave her: “He said to me one time, ‘I always try to say yes when people ask me to do things because I never know when I might be surprised by the outcome.’”

The latest recipient of the FCA’s annual Robert Rauschenberg Award, which includes an unrestricted cash prize of $35,000, is sound artist and visual artist Jennie C. Jones. The three previous awardees were choreographer Trisha Brown and composers Elodie Lauten and Eve Beglarian.

As part of the 2016 awards cycle, FCA has also announced 14 grants to artists in the disciplines of dance, music/sound, performance art/theatre, poetry, and visual arts, each of whom will also receive $35,000. The awardees in the music/sound category are Ashley Fure, William Winant, and Nate Wooley.

Complete details on all the 2016 awardees are posted on the FCA website.

2016 NEA Jazz Masters Announced

2016NEAJazzMasters

The National Endowment for the Arts will honor four jazz leaders–three musicians and an advocate–with the 2016 NEA Jazz Masters award for their significant accomplishments in the field. The 2016 honorees are: jazz fusion progenitor and educator Gary Burton whose four-mallet technique on the vibraphone has given the instrument a fuller, more piano-like sound than the traditional two-mallet approach; Grammy Award-winning saxophonist and composer Pharoah Sanders who is known for his distinctive sound marked by overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques; saxophonist, composer and educator Archie Shepp, best known for his Afrocentric music of the late 1960s, whose long career as an educator has focused on history of African-American music from its origins in Africa to its current state; and Wendy Oxenhorn, executive director and vice chairman of the Jazz Foundation of America, an organization that is committed to providing jazz and blues musicians with financial, medical, housing, and legal assistance as well as performance opportunities, with a special focus on the elderly and veterans who have paid their dues and find themselves in crisis due to illness, age, and/or circumstance.

The NEA Jazz Masters award is the highest honor that our nation bestows in the field of jazz and includes a cash award of $25,000 and an award ceremony and celebratory concert, among other activities. As part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ 50th anniversary events, the annual NEA Jazz Masters celebration will take place in April 2016 in the nation’s capital, in collaboration with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. More details are available on the NEA’s website.

(–from the press release)

D.J. Spooky Wins National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer Award

Photo of Paul D. Miller, a.k.a. D.J. Spooky

Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. D.J. Spooky). Photo by Thomas Fang

Composer Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. D.J. Spooky, That Subliminal Kid) is among 14 recipients of the National Geographic Society’s 2014 Emerging Explorer Awards. The Emerging Explorers Program recognizes and supports uniquely gifted and inspiring adventurers, scientists and innovators who are at the forefront of discovery, adventure, and global problem-solving while still early in their careers. The other 13 awardees besides Miller, who is the only composer in this group, are inventor Jack Andraka, educator Shabana Basij-Rasikh, conservation biologist Shivani Bhalla, ecologist and epidemiologist Christopher Golden, marine biologist David Gruber, paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim, creative conservationist Asher Jay, conservation biologist Juliana Machado Ferreira, environmentalist Maritza Morales Casanova, social entrepreneur Sanga Moses, author and campaigner Tristram Stuart, electrical engineer Robert Wood, and nanoscientist Xiaolin Zheng. Each Emerging Explorer receives a $10,000 award to aid further research and exploration. The new Emerging Explorers are introduced in the June 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine.
According to the National Geographic citation, Miller was selected because his “multimedia performances, recordings, art installations, and writings immerse audiences in a blend of genres, raising awareness about climate change, sustainability, global culture, the role of technology in society, and other pressing environmental and social issues. His multimedia composition, book, and installation The Book of Ice creates an experiential visual and acoustic portrait of Antarctica’s disappearing environment. In Nauru Elegies, he explores, through a string ensemble, video, animation, and live Internet feed, problems facing the environmentally exploited South Pacific island of Nauru. He also founded Vanuatu Pacifica Foundation, a sustainable arts center on the island of Vanuatu.”
National Geographic Emerging Explorers may be selected from virtually any field, ranging from the society’s traditional arenas of anthropology, archaeology, photography, space exploration, earth sciences, mountaineering, and cartography to the worlds of technology, art, music, and filmmaking.

(—from the press release)