Herewith, the first of several posts on Louisville, which will host the national meeting of the American Musicological Society in November. It's a happening place.
Well, not actually a million. But if $100,000 will satisfy, travel to
Louisville, Kentucky. Site of the 2015
AMS National Meeting, the largest city in Kentucky is also home to the
Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, the largest monetary prize in the world
of art music composition. (It even rates
multiple mentions in Grove, under “Awards,” “Louisville,” and “Libraries,
§7(ii): Canada and the USA.”)
The Music Composition Award is one of a quintet collectively known as the Grawemeyer Awards™, founded in 1984 by philanthropist
H. Charles Grawemeyer “to help make the world a better place” (website home HERE; with links to history, rules, etc.) This “industrialist, entrepreneur, astute
investor, and philanthropist” gave an initial endowment of $9 million to his
alma mater, the University of Louisville. A year after its creation, the first award
for Music Composition was given to Witold Lutosławski for his Third Symphony (1985).
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H. Charles Grawemeyer 1912-93 |
To recognize Grawemeyer’s own amateur status, each award committee is set up so that laypersons have a
voice during the deliberations. The process for the Music Composition Award
is as follows: “after an initial screening [by University of Louisville music
faculty], the Grawemeyer Music Award Committee will appoint a jury of three
internationally recognized music professionals: normally a composer, a
conductor, and a critic. Each juror will select, from the qualifying scores, up
to three works they deem worthy of the Award.” These selected works are then
submitted anonymously to the Final Committee [of “non-professional, but
knowledgeable” laypersons to be judged by listening only. The Final Committee then recommends one of
these works to the president of the University of Louisville, upon which the president and Board of Trustees grant the Award.
Candidates must be living composers, and the work in
question must be “in a large musical genre: choral, orchestral, chamber,
electronic, song-cycle, dance, opera, musical theater, extended solo work and
more. The award will be granted for a work premiered during the five-year
period prior to the award date.” No composer is allowed to nominate his or her
own entry but must be submitted by “a professional musical organization or
individual (performer or performing group, conductor, critic, publisher, or
head of a professional music school or department).”
The nominated score, a recording of the work, and
documentation of the premiere are sent to the Grawemeyer Music Award
Committee. The university retains
all the submitted scores and recordings, housing them in the Grawemeyer Collection of New Music, a part of
the Library of the School of Music. The
collection presently includes over 2,500 entries, many of which are unpublished and
unavailable elsewhere. (The collection is searchable online here.) Previous winners include Györgi Ligeti (Etudes for Piano, 1986), Joan Tower (Silver Ladders, 1990), John Corigliano (First Symphony, 1991), John Adams (Violin Concerto, 1995), Kaija Saariaho (L’amour de loin, 2003), and Peter
Lieberson (Neruda Songs, 2008). The 2015 award was given to Wolfgang Rihm for
the orchestral IN-SCHRIFT-II.
The entry form is available HERE. Meanwhile the Collection of
New Music staff cordially invites visitors to Louisville to come have a look. They promise research topics in abundance.
Christopher Little is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky
writing his dissertation on the persistence of Romantic sensibilities
and style in England during the early twentieth century.
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