David Vayo

2000 Guggenheim Fellowships: David Vayo

David Vayo (b. 1957) is an Associate Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he teaches composition, twentieth-century music, and Latin American music, and coordinates the Symposium of Contemporary Music and the New Music Café concert series. Vayo has also taught at Connecticut College and the National University of Costa Rica.

Recent performances of Vayo's works have taken place in Seoul, San Francisco, Amsterdam, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Atlanta, and Bogotá. Festivals which have programmed his work include the International Trombone Festival, the International Double Reed Festival, the Banff Festival of the Arts, and the World Music Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music. Vayo's Symphony, Blossoms and Awakenings, has been performed four times by the St. Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin. His compositions are published by MMB Music, A. M. Percussion Publications, and the International Trombone Association Press. Vayo serves as Membership Chair for the Society of Composers, Inc.

Vayo holds an A.Mus.D. in Composition from The University of Michigan, where his principal teachers were Leslie Bassett and William Bolcom; his M. Mus. and B. Mus. degrees are from Indiana University, where he studied with Frederick Fox and Juan Orrego-Salas. Vayo has received awards from ASCAP, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Music Center, and has been granted numerous artists' colony residencies.