Ten young composers received cash prizes totaling $20,000 during the 61st Annual BMI Student Composer Awards. Among the winners were Juan Pablo Contreras who received the William Schuman Prize, the top honor, and Michael D. Parsons who received the Carlos Surinach Prize, awarded to the competition’s youngest winner, for the second consecutive year.

Tania León, Jon Deak, Steve Smith, the late Morton Gould, and 28 young composers were honored by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) during its 14th Annual Concert Music Awards, an invitation-only event held at Merkin Concert Hall at the Kaufman Center in New York City on Friday, May 17, 2013.

This year the academy gave out a total of $910,000 to 68 visual artists, architects, writers, and composers during the 2013 Ceremonial. Bob Dylan was inducted as an honorary member of the academy.

Aside from the spectacular content, these shows illustrated (to me at least) the impact of the venue and how spaces shape the experience and help guide the audience.

New York City-based composer/saxophonist Alex Mincek was among the six mid-career artists honored on May 10, 2013, by the Herb Alpert Foundation and the California Institute of the Arts with a 19th annual Alpert Award in the Arts.

What’s the role of the writer—or, more ominously, the critic—in today’s musical ecosystem? Does anyone even read concert reviews anymore? In this series of interviews, I’m going straight to the source—music critics themselves—to find out why they do what they do.

The organization will reconfigure five of its current funding programs into a unified channel of flexible support for a wide range of new music projects.

Kezar Pavilion was an atypical but fitting venue for the West Coast premiere of David Lang’s battle hymns, a large-scale reflection on war.

Zhou Long has been awarded the 2012-13 Elise L. Stoeger Prize for composers by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The Stoeger Prize is a $25,000 cash award given every two years in recognition of significant contributions to the field of chamber music composition rather than for a specific work.

Dean Drummond’s musical universe is a sublime architecture of numbers, ratios, and rhythmic patterns. Throughout an insanely busy life, he steadily built a body of complex, beautiful music that reflected his acute social conscience.