Ted Hearne Wins 2009 Gaudeamus Prize

Ted Hearne Wins 2009 Gaudeamus Prize

The 2009 Gaudeamus Prize has been awarded to Ted Hearne for selected movements from Katrina Ballads, a composition performed on September 10, 2009, at the Conservatory of Amsterdam by the ensemble ‘de ereprijs’ conducted by Wim Boerman and featuring Hearne as a vocal soloist.

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Ted Hearne

The 2009 Gaudeamus Prize has been awarded to Ted Hearne for selected movements from Katrina Ballads, a composition performed on September 10, 2009 at the Conservatory of Amsterdam by the ensemble ‘de ereprijs’ conducted by Wim Boerman and featuring Hearne as a vocal soloist. Hearne was given the award—which consists of 4,550 Euros, intended as a commission for a new work to be performed at the next edition of the International Gaudeamus Music Week in 2010—at the final concert of the International Gaudeamus Music Week 2009, which took place in Amsterdam from September 7-12, 2009.

Ted Hearne (b.1982), originally from Chicago and now based in New York, is active as a composer, conductor, and performer of new music. He is the artistic director of Yes is a World, resident conductor of Red Light New Music, composer-in-residence of the Chicago Children’s Choir, and leader of the band Your Bad Self. Hearne’s Katrina Ballads premiered at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and is available on CD from New Amsterdam Records. Hearne is currently working toward a DMA at the Yale School of Music. (In 2008, Hearne participated in the Minnesota Orchestra’s Composer Institute and blogged about the experience for NewMusicBox.)

In addition to Hearne’s Gaudeamus award, Toru Nakatani (Japan, 1979) received an honorable mention for 16_1/64_1, performed on September 9 by Ensemble of the Conservatory of Amsterdam conducted by Jos Zwaanenburg in the “Muziekgebouw aan’t IJ”. The Gaudeamus Prize and the honorable mention were awarded by jury members Huba de Graaff (Netherlands), Anne La Berge (Netherlands), and Akira Nishimura (Japan). For this year’s International Gaudeamus Music Week, which was open to composers under 31, the Gaudeamus Foundation received almost 400 scores from all over the world; the jury subsequently selected fifteen works to compete for the Gaudeamus Prize 2009. There was another competition in de Gaudeamus Music Week: the Project Jonge Componisten (PJC) by Holland Symfonia. In the PJC, three prizes were awarded: the PJC Prize (4,000 Euros) went to Matthias Kranebitter; the PJC Encouragement Prize and the PJC Audience Prize both went to Janco Verduin. The next edition of the International Gaudeamus Music Week will take place in September 2010 in Amsterdam with an application deadline of January 31, 2010. The International Gaudeamus Music Week is an activity of Music Center the Netherlands. (—Condensed from the press release)