LOUIS KARCHIN TO RECEIVE THE ANDREW IMBRIE AWARD FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

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LOUIS KARCHIN TO RECEIVE THE ANDREW IMBRIE AWARD FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS

Winner of the 2012 Andrew Imbrie Award Louis KarchinWinner of the 2012 Andrew Imbrie Award Seventeen Composers Receive Awards Totaling $180,000

New York, February
28, 2012
—The American Academy of Arts and Letters announced today the
seventeen recipients of this year's awards in music, which total
$180,000. 

The winners were selected by a committee of Academy
members:  Ezra Laderman (chairman), David Del Tredici, John Harbison, Fred
Lerdahl, Tania Leon, Bernard
Rands, Gunther Schuller, and Steven Stucky.   The awards will be
presented at the Academy's annual Ceremonial in May.  Candidates for music
awards are nominated by the 250 members of the Academy.

ARTS AND
LETTERS Awards in Music

Four composers will each receive
a $7500 Arts and Letters Award in Music, which honors outstanding artistic
achievement and acknowledges the composer who has arrived at his or her own
voice.  Each will receive an additional $7500 toward the recording of one
work.  The winners are Paul Moravec, Frank Ticheli, Dan Welcher, and John
Zorn.

Walter
Hinrichsen Award

Reena Esmail will receive the
Walter Hinrichsen Award for the publication of a work by a gifted
composer.  This award was established by the C. F. Peters Corporation,
music publishers, in 1984.

Andrew
Imbrie Award

Louis
Karchin
will receive the Andrew Imbrie Award in Music.  This
award, being inaugurated this year, is given to a composer of demonstrated
artistic merit, and is made possible through a gift from Andrew and Barbara
Imbrie.

Goddard
Lieberson Fellowships

Two Goddard Lieberson fellowships, endowed in 1978 by the CBS Foundation, are given to mid-career
composers of exceptional gifts.  This year they will go to Edmund Campion
and Huck Hodge.

Charles
Ives Fellowships

Harmony Ives, the widow of
Charles Ives, bequeathed to the Academy the royalties of Charles Ives' music,
which has enabled the Academy to give the Ives awards in composition since
1970.  Two Charles Ives Fellowships, will be awarded to Haralabos Stafylakis and Xi Wang.

 

Charles Ives Scholarships

Niccolo
Athens, Sean Friar, David Hertzberg, Takuma Itoh, Wang Jie, and Chris Rogerson will receive Charles Ives
Scholarships of $7500, given to composition students of great promise.

 

MARC BLITZSTEIN MEMORIAL AWARD
FOR MUSICAL THEATER

Friends of the late Academician
Marc Blitzstein set up an award, now $5,000, in his memory to be given from
time to time to a composer, lyricist, or librettist to encourage the creation
of works of merit for musical theater and opera.  Chosen by a specially
selected committee, the composer John Kander will be awarded this prize.

 

THE ACADEMY

The American Academy of Arts and
Letters was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist, and sustain an interest in
literature, music, and the fine arts."  Each year, the Academy honors
over 50 composers, artists, architects, and writers with cash awards ranging
from $5000 to $100,000.  Other activities of the Academy are exhibitions
of art, architecture, and manuscripts; purchases of art for donations to
museums; publications on the Academy's history and events; readings and
performances of new musicals.  The Academy is located in three landmark
buildings designed by McKim, Mead & White, Cass Gilbert, and Charles Pratt
Huntington, on Audubon Terrace at 155 Street and Broadway.

 

Biographies
of 2012 Award Winners in Music

 

Niccolo
Athens
(b. 1988)
grew up in San Antonio, Texas.  In 2010, he received his Bachelor of Music
in composition from The Juilliard School, and he is currently enrolled in the
DMA program at Cornell University.  He is the recipient of two BMI Student
Composer Awards, the emerging composer prize of the American Art Song
Competition for Composers, and first prize in the Longfellow Chorus
Competition.  In 2009, he participated in the Staunton Music
Festival.  Ensembles which have performed his work include the Juilliard
Orchestra, the New Juilliard Ensemble, The Momenta Quartet, the Olmos Ensemble,
and the San Antonio Symphony.

 

Edmund Campion is Professor of Music Composition at UC Berkeley and Co-Director
at the Center for New Music and Audio.  Born in Dallas, Texas, in 1957, he
studied composition at the University of Texas, Columbia University, and in
France studying with composer Gérard Grisey.  He worked at IRCAM where he
composed Losing Touch, a mainstay in the repertoire for percussion and
electronics.  He has been commissioned by IRCAM, Radio France, the French
Ministry of Culture, Societé Generale, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and the
Santa Rosa Symphony.  Campion will be Composer-in-Residence with the Santa
Rosa Symphony for the 2012-13 season. 

 

Indian-American
composer Reena Esmail received her training at The Juilliard School (BM
'05) and Yale School of Music (MM '11), and has studied with teachers including
Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis and Chris Theofanidis. She is currently on a
yearlong Fulbright grant to India to study Hindustani classical music with
Gaurav Mazumdar in Delhi. Esmail was awarded an “INK” Innovation and Knowledge
Fellowship this past December, and has been invited to speak about her work at
events in Jaipur, Chennai, Delhi, and on national radio and television in
India. She will be returning to the US to start her doctoral degree at Yale in
the fall of 2012.

Sean
Friar
was born
in Los Angeles in 1985.  He thrives on composing for ensembles both within
and outside the realm of traditional concert music, and his recent commissions
run the gamut from a large-scale work for the Berlin Philharmonic Scharoun
Ensemble to a junk car percussion concerto for the American Composers
Orchestra.  The youngest winner of the Rome Prize in over 25 years,
Friar’s honors include the Aaron Copland Award, four ASCAP Young Composer
Awards, a Lee Ettelson Award, and a First Music Award.  He graduated from
UCLA in 2007 and is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

 

David
Hertzberg
is
currently in his fourth year of the accelerated BM/MM program at The Juilliard
School, where he studies with Samuel Adler, and from where he will graduate
with distinction.  His works have been performed by soprano Jennifer
Zetlan and the Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall, by pianist James
Goldsworthy on the Unique Voices concert series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and
by members of the Argento Ensemble at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New
York.  Among his recent distinctions are the 2011 William Schuman Prize
from BMI and the 2011 Arthur Friedman Prize from The Juilliard School.

 

Huck
Hodge

writes music that explores the embodied poetics of organized sound, perceptual
illusion and the threshold between design and intuition. He has won the Rome
Prize, the Gaudeamus Prize and the Aaron Copland Fellowship from the Bogliasco
Foundation, among many other awards and commissions.  Praised by the New
York Times
for his “harmonically fresh work…full of both sparkle and
thunder,” his collaborators include members of Ensemble Modern, the Berlin
Philharmonic and the ASKO Ensemble.  Hodge studied composition at Columbia
University and the Musikhochschule Stuttgart. He is currently Assistant
Professor in Composition at the University of Washington.

 

Takuma
Itoh
was born in
Japan and raised in Northern California. Currently a DMA candidate at Cornell
University, he earned a MM from the University of Michigan and a BM from Rice
University. His compositions have been performed by the Albany Symphony, the
New York Youth Symphony, Symphony in C, the Shanghai Quartet, the St. Lawrence
Quartet, the Momenta Quartet, Argento Ensemble, the H2 saxophone quartet, and
by the violinist Joseph Lin. He is the recipient of four ASCAP Morton Gould
Young Composer Awards and has attended the Aspen Music Festival and the Pacific
Music Festival.

 

Shanghai-born
Wang Jie has emerged as one of the most distinctive musical voices among
young American composers. Composition protégée of Nils Vigeland at Manhattan
School of Music and Richard Danielpour at Curtis Institute of Music, her work
has had performances by the American Composers Orchestra, the Minnesota
Orchestra, New York City Opera, Continuum, among others. She has received
honors from ASCAP, BMI, and Opera America. Critics from the NY Times,
Classicsource.com and Minnesota's Pioneer Press refer to her work as
"fascinating," "self-assured," and sometimes “far more fun
than one is supposed to have at a concert of ‘serious’ music”.

 

John
Kander
has
received Tony Awards for Cabaret, Woman Of The year, Kiss Of The
Spiderwoman,
a Laurence Olivier Award for the London production of Chicago,
Emmy Awards for Liza With A Z and Liza Minnelli Live! From Radio
City Music Hall
, and Grammy Awards for Cabaret, Original Cast Album,
and for Chicago, Musical Show Album.  Together with Fred Ebb, the
team also received numerous nominations, which include five more Tony Awards,
two Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards.  In 1998, he and Ebb
received the Kennedy Center Honors award for Lifetime Achievement.

 

Louis
Karchin
has had
over sixty works performed worldwide.  A Naxos CD release of his opera, Romulus,
garnered accolades in England, Germany, and the U.S., with Opera News
proclaiming it “unfailingly fresh...it announces its originality right out of
the gate and sustains it through to the very end of its seventy-two-minute
running time.”  A Guggenheim fellow for 2011-12, Karchin has been
commissioned by the Koussevitzky, Fromm, and Barlow foundations, and received
prizes from the AAAL (Goddard Lieberson and Walter Hinrichsen Awards) and the
National Endowment for the Arts.  His music publishers are C. F. Peters
Corporation and the American Composers Alliance.   He is Professor of
Music at New York University.

 

Paul Moravec, recipient of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Music,
has composed over one hundred works for the orchestral, chamber, choral,
lyric, film, and operatic genres. Recent premieres include The Letter at
Santa Fe Opera, The Blizzard Voices at Opera Omaha, and Brandenburg
Gate
with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. His catalog of
recordings includes four albums for Naxos American Classics: Tempest Fantasy,
The Time Gallery, Cool Fire, and Useful Knowledge.  He is
University Professor at Adelphi, recently served as Artist-in-Residence with
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was elected to the American
Philosophical Society in 2010. His website is www.paulmoravec.com, and his publisher is
Subito Music.

Chris
Rogerson’s
music
has been praised for its “virtuosic exuberance” and “haunting beauty” (New
York Times
).  Ensembles such as the New World Symphony, Buffalo
Philharmonic, Grand Rapids Symphony, and the New York Youth Symphony have
performed his work at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, and
the Library of Congress.  He has won awards and fellowships from ASCAP,
the MacDowell Colony, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Presser Foundation.
Rogerson is Composer-in-Residence with Young Concert Artists and attended the
Curtis Institute of Music and Yale University, where he studied with Jennifer
Higdon, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Martin Bresnick.   
   

 

Montréal-born
composer Haralabos Stafylakis completed his bachelor’s degree in music
composition at McGill University in 2010, having studied with Chris Paul
Harman, Jean Lesage, and John Rea. He is currently working toward his Ph.D. in
music at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, studying with
David Del Tredici and Jason Eckardt.  His awards include two SOCAN
Foundation Awards for Young Composers, a Canada Council for the Arts “Grant for
Professional Musicians”, finalist at the Alea III Composition Competition, and
first prize in the Guitare Montréal composition competition.  He is
published by Les Productions d’OZ.

 

Frank Ticheli is in his 21st year as Professor of Composition at the University
of Southern California's Thornton School of Music. From 1991 to 1998, Ticheli
was Composer-in-Residence of the Pacific Symphony. Ticheli's orchestral works
have been performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony, Detroit
Symphony, Dallas Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and many other
orchestras throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Recent compositions
include Songs of Love and Life for soprano and 18 players, and Clarinet
Concerto, composed for soloist Håkan Rosengren. He is currently composing
The Shore,
a choral symphony for the Pacific Chorale and Pacific Symphony,
to be premiered and recorded by them on a Delos label CD. Other recordings of
his music are being released this year on the Reference, Klavier, and Naxos
labels.

 

Christopher Theofanidis is on the faculty of Yale University and has taught at the
Peabody Conservatory and The Juilliard School.  He writes for a variety of
musical genres, from orchestral and chamber music to opera and ballet. 
His work, Rainbow Body, has been programmed by over 120 orchestras
internationally.   Mr. Theofanidis’ works have been performed by the
New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and he has a long-standing relationship with the
Atlanta Symphony.  Mr. Theofanidis has written widely for the stage, from
a work for the American Ballet Theatre, to multiple dramatic pieces, including The
Refuge
for the Houston Grand Opera and Heart of a Soldier for the
San Francisco Opera.  His large-scale piece, The Here and Now, was
nominated for a Grammy award in 2007. 

 

Xi Wang’s orchestral music has been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra,
Atlanta Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic, Spokane
Symphony, among others. She has received awards from Meet the Composer, National Endowment
for the Arts, American Music Center, and ASCAP. Her fellowships include the
MacDowell Colony, Composers Conference and Chamber Music Center, Pacific Music
Festival, Aspen Music Festival, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Music 04,
Oregon Bach Music Festival, the Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum
of the East, and the Hinrichsen Foundation.  Xi Wang received her B.M.
from Shanghai Conservatory, M.M. from University of Missouri-Kansas City, and
D.M.A from Cornell University. She is Assistant Professor in Music at the
Southern Methodist University.

 

Critic
Royal S. Brown, writing in High Fidelity magazine, called Dan Welcher
“one of the most promising American composers I have heard.”  With
over one hundred works to his credit, more than half of which are published and
recorded, Welcher has written in virtually every medium, including opera,
oratorio, concerto, symphony, wind ensemble, vocal literature, piano solos, and
various kinds of chamber music.  His orchestral music has been performed
by more than fifty orchestras, including the BBC Symphony, Chicago Symphony,
St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and Dallas Symphony. He is a Guggenheim fellow, has received awards from
numerous agencies, and commissions from some of the world’s leading ensembles
and artists. Welcher holds the Lee Hage Jamail Regents Professorship in
Fine Arts at the Butler School of Music (University of Texas at Austin), where
he directs the New Music Ensemble.

 

Drawing
upon his experience in classical, jazz, rock, hardcore punk, klezmer,
film, cartoon, popular, world and improvised music, John Zorn has
created an influential body of work that defies academic
categories. Born and raised in New York City, he is a central
figure in the Downtown Scene, incorporating a wide variety of creative
musicians into various compositional formats. His work is diverse
and remarkably eclectic and draws inspiration from art, literature,
film, theatre, philosophy, alchemy and mysticism, as well as
music. He founded the Tzadik label in 1995, runs the East Village
performance space The Stone, and has edited/published five volumes of
musician's writings under the title ARCANA.   Honors include the
Cultural Achievement Award from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and
the William Schuman Prize for composition from Columbia University. He was
inducted into the Long Island Hall of Fame by Lou Reed in 2010 and is a
MacArthur Fellow. In 2012 he was given the honorary doctorate Magister Artium
Gaundensis by the University of Ghent, Belgium.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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