New Music News Wire

New Music News Wire

Donald Martino has been elected to the Classical Music Hall of Fame; Benjamin Lees donates archive to Yale; James Kendrick Appointed to ASCAP’s board of directors following two consecutive nights of ASCAP awards honoring a wide variety of music; Harvestworks announces its 2008 Artists In Residence; and 27 composers receive over $30K in the latest AMC Composer Assistance Program awards.

Written By

NewMusicBox Staff

 

Donald Martino Elected to Classical Music Hall of Fame

 


Donald Martino

Composer Donald Martino (1931–2005) has been inducted posthumously into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, a Cincinnati-based non-profit organization whose stated mission is celebrating the past, present, and future of American classical music. In addition to Martino, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, tuba soloist and Indiana University Music Professor Emeritus Harvey Phillips, and the Cleveland Orchestra have also been inducted.

Since 1998, the Hall of Fame has honored prominent American composers, performers, advocates, and institutions in an annual induction ceremony; previous composer inductees include Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, Amy Beach, William Billings, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg, and George Walker. The Hall of Fame, which makes its home in Cincinnati’s Memorial Hall, selected this year’s honorees by a national balloting process of its member organizations, as well as composers, educators, and producers who sit on its directorate. The voting was supervised by the directorate, chaired by composer Samuel Adler and Douglas Lowry, dean of the Eastman School of Music.

Benjamin Lees Donates Archive to Yale

 


Benjamin Lees

Composer Benjamin Lees recently donated his entire archive to Yale University’s Irving S. Gilmore Library. The comprehensive archive includes manuscript sketches and scores for all of the 83-year-old composer’s works, which include two operas, five symphonies, three piano concertos, and six string quartets, as well as correspondence, concert programs, reviews, photographs, and biographical materials.

James Kendrick Appointed to ASCAP Board of Directors

 

The Board of Directors of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has elected Schott/EAM President James M. Kendrick to serve as the Concert Music Publisher representative on its Board of Directors. Kendrick, a distinguished copyright attorney and a member of the board of directors of the American Music Center, is the president of Schott/European American Music, which represents works by composers including Tobias Picker, Harry Partch, Stephen Paulus, Alvin Singleton, and Kurt Weill. ASCAP has additionally appointed to its board Barry Coburn, co-president of Ten Ten Music Group, one of Nashville’s leading independent music publishers.

Two Consecutive Nights of ASCAP Awards Honor a Wide Variety of Music

 

In ceremonies stretching across two consecutive evenings, ASCAP has honored a wide range of music and musicians in its annual Foundation Awards and Deems Taylor Awards ceremonies.

ASCAP Foundation award and scholarship recipients include: Kati Agócs (Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship); Brandon Anderson (Frederick Loewe Scholarship), Kit Armstrong (Charlotte V. Bergen Scholarship); Wycliffe Gordon (Foundation Vanguard Award); Sean Hartley (Harold Arlen Musical Theater Award); Joshua Feltman (Foundation Fellowship for Composition and Film Scoring); Raymond J. Lustig (Rudolf Nissim Prize); Lin-Manuel Miranda (Richard Rodgers New Horizons Award); and Aaron Muesing (Boosey & Hawkes Young Composer Award Honoring Aaron Copland). In addition, recipients of the Foundation’s Young Jazz Composer Awards, sponsored by the Gibson Foundation, are Fabian Almazan, Patrick Cornelius, George Dulin, Lee Forest Dynes, Morgan Jones, Grace Kelly, Ross LaFleur, Pascal Le Boeuf, Remy Le Boeuf, Jimmy Macbride, Chase Morrin, Bob Reynolds, Joshua Richman, Robert Rodriguez, Sherisse Rogers, Matt Savage, Jon Snell, Mark Steinert, Nikos Syropoulos, Ted Taforo, Manuel Valera, Joshua Vande Hey, and Ezra Weiss.

The Deems Taylor Awards, now in their 40th year, annually reward excellence in writing and media coverage about music (books, articles, CD booklet notes, internet, radio, and television broadcasts). This year’s award-winning books include John Gennari’s Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (The University of Chicago Press); Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time, the autobiography of Lorraine Gordon as told to Barry Singer (Hal Leonard Trade Books); Ben Johnston’s Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music (University of Illinois Press); and Jack Sullivan’s Hitchcock’s Music (Yale University Press). Award-winning articles include Elizabeth B. Crist’s “Mutual Responses in the Midst of an Era: Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide,” published by The Journal of Musicology, University of California Press; Marilee Bradford’s liner notes to a recording of Herbert Stothart’s scores for the films Random Harvest and The Yearling, released by Film Score Monthly; Ted Panken’s “Smalls Universe,” published by DownBeat; and “Start Small, Think Big,” an article about Joan Tower’s Made in America for Symphony written by NewMusicBox’s own Molly Sheridan.

WNYC FM and wnyc.org were awarded the first Deems Taylor Multimedia Award for 24 Hours and 33 Minutes, The Playful and Playable Cage: A WNYC Festival (Alex Ambrose, Producer; Helga Davis, Host; Brad Cresswell, webmaster; George Preston, WNYC Music Director; and Limor Tomer, Executive Producer). The Television Award was given to American Masters – Les Paul: Chasing Sound, which aired on PBS (John Paulson, director; James Arntz, writer and producer; Susan Lacy, Executive Producer American Masters; Glenn Aveni, Executive Producer Icon Television Music). In addition, a special recognition award was given to Bridge Records, Inc. for the ongoing excellence of its CD booklet notes.

Harvestworks Announnces 2008 Artists In Residence

 

The 2008 Harvestworks artists in residence have been announced. The recipients are commissioned to create a new work in the Harvestworks Digital Media Facility. William Cusick will create a surround sound score to a psychological horror video installation tentatively titled Americana Kamikaze, which tells the story of an American business man whose life inexplicably begins to mirror a series of Japanese ghost stories. Shelley Hirsch will complete Kaddish for Him and Her, a 5.1 surround sound choral piece in memory of the artist’s late parents. Bill Hsu, in collaboration with saxophonist John Butcher, will develop new pieces using an electronic system in which timbral characteristics such as brightness, pitch/noise, roughness, and inharmonicity are tracked over a musical gesture to generate synthesized responses. Sawako Kato will create a 5.1 surround sound journey through two megalopolises, NYC and Tokyo. Jane Rigler will create a new composition for 2 flutes and electronics that deals with dreams, tendencies and cycles of the human physical and spiritual existence.

In addition, Joseph Delappe, Derek Frantz, Shauna Moulton, Jessica Peavey, and Christine Sugrue have been awarded residencies to create video, web, or interactive performances, and Laure Drogul will create a networked interactive knitting needle working symphony involving approximately 40 knitter-performers knitting in unison with mini pick-up microphones to create a singular knit object-environment. The following artists were chosen as alternates: Maya Suess, Joe Diebes, Brian Block, and Eunjung Hwang. The following artists were awarded educational scholarships: Penelope Umbrico, Andy Deck, Mary-Beth Gregg, Phillys Bulkin-Lehrer, Paul Amitai, and Gisburg.

The applications were reviewed by Zach Layton (composer, curator and new media artist), Liz Slagus (Director of Educatiuon and Public Programming at Eyebeam), and Kenseth Armstead (digital media artist and sculpturist).

27 Composers Receive Over $30K in Latest AMC Composer Assistance Program Awards

 

The American Music Center has awarded a total of $33,555 to 27 American composers residing in 11 states and ranging in age from 27 to 67 through the autumn round of its Composer Assistance Program. For a complete list of the award-winning composers and the ensembles who will premiere their works, please visit the AMC website.

Compiled and edited by Frank J. Oteri