AAAL Announces 2001 Award Winners

American Academy of Arts and Letters (seal)

On February 27, 2001, the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the seventeen recipients of this year’s awards in music, which total $185,000. The winners were selected by a committee of Academy members: Jack Beeson (chairman), Leslie Bassett, Andrew Imbrie, George Perle, and Ned Rorem. The awards will be presented at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May.

Candidates for music awards are nominated by the Academy’s membership of 250. Nominees were asked to submit two original scores.

Four composers will each receive a $7500 Academy Award in Music, which honors lifetime achievement and acknowledges the composer who has arrived at his or her own voice. This year’s winners are Gerald Plain, Allen Shawn, Bright Sheng, and Augusta Read Thomas. Each of them will also receive $7500 toward the recording of one work.

The $500 Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award, inaugurated in 1993, will go this year to the composer Braxton Blake.

The Goddard Lieberson Fellowships, endowed in 1978 by the CBS Foundation, are given to composers of exceptional gifts. This year the two $15,000 fellowships are awarded to Louis Karchin and Mark Kilstofte.

Kurt Rohde was chosen to receive the Walter Hinrichsen Award for the publication of an engraved edition of a work by a gifted composer. This award was established by the C.F. Peters Corporation in 1984.

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 music since 1970. Three Charles Ives Fellowships of $15,000 each for composers in mid career will be awarded to Sally Lamb, Russell Platt, and Erik Santos.

James Barry, Michael Djupstrom, Gabriela Frank, Hubert Ho, Jonathan Newman and Tom Swafford will each receive a Charles Ives Scholarship of $7500, given to composition students of great promise.