Kenneth Frazelle Awarded $10,000 Barlow Prize; Eight Others Receive Commissions
|
- Interview with Kenneth Frazelle
Nine commissions have been awarded by The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University. North Carolina composer Kenneth Frazelle has won the largest of these—the Barlow Prize. This year the $10,000 commission is for a sacred song cycle scheduled for premiere by Erie Mills in 2003. Jeffrey Ryan, an affiliate composer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra who teaches at the Royal Conservatory of Music, received an honorable mention for the prize.
Frazelle, who was also recently awarded a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is composer-in-residence with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Santa Rosa Symphony and teaches at the North Carolina School of the Arts. In an interview with Molly Sheridan, Frazelle talks about his plans for the commission and life as a North Carolina composer.
Eight other composers were awarded Barlow commissions totaling nearly $40,000: Dorothy Chang (chamber work for Kylix New Music Ensemble); Shih-Hui Chen (piece for pipa and chamber orchestra for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project); Lisa DeSpain (string quartet for Cassatt String Quartet and Buglisi/Foreman Dance Company); Stacy Garrop (chamber work for Klang); Louis Karchin (work for baritone and piano); CÈsar AndrÈs Mateus (chamber orchestra with Mitchell Newman and Bryan Pezzone, soloists); James Mobberley (chamber work for newEar); and Mack Wilberg (Bach Choir of Pittsburgh).
The prize is judged by the Barlow Endowment Board of Advisors with additional guest judges representing the interests and perspectives of the performers. The awarding panel this year included Claude Baker, Barlow Bradford, Stephen Jones, Bruce Polay, and Chen Yi. Erie Mills and her accompanist, Jeffry Peterson, joined the board as guest judges for the Barlow Prize.
The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition was established in 1983 at Brigham Young University by Milton A. and Gloria Barlow to support excellence in musical composition. For the first several years, the Barlow prize was awarded to a submitted composition, but since 1995 the prize has been awarded as a commission for a consortium of performers. The Board of Directors and Board of Advisors have now structured the endowment to support three other programs in addition to the Barlow prize: General Commissions, LDS [Latter-day Saints] Composer Commissions, and Education Grants.
Each year, the Barlow prize rotates its focus among various music categories including choral, large and small chamber, and orchestral music. Next year’s prize will spotlight a major new work for solo organ.
Since its inception, the endowment has commissioned over 140 new works performed by 104 different ensembles. Composers such as Samuel Adler, Dominick Argento, John Harbison, Bernard Rands, Joseph Schwantner, Joan Tower, and Augusta Read Thomas have received Barlow commissions in the past, and Melinda Wagner Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of 1999 was commissioned by the Barlow Endowment.