The School of Music's leading role in training young composers was evident when the American Academy of Arts and Letters announced the winners of its 2000 Music Awards last month: Six of the 16 honorees are current students or alumni.
The winners were selected by a committee of academy members, all distinguished composers. The formal presentation of the awards will take place at the academy's annual awards ceremony in May.
Three current School of Music students and one alumna will each receive $7,500 Charles Ives Scholarships in recognition of their contributions. The current students are John Kaefer, Marcus Maroney and Eli Marshall. Christina Haisung Ahn, who earned an Artist's Diploma from the school in 1999 also won a $7,500 Ives Scholarship.
Kaefer, a first-year student, started composing at the age of 10 and has since written numerous orchestral works, a viola concerto, choral music, chamber works and piano solos. His other honors for composition include a 1999 Britten-On-The-Bay Award for a French horn composition, the 1998 Renee B. Fisher Foundation Composer Award, the 1997 Nadia Boulanger Scholarship from La Schola Cantorum in Paris, the George Eastman Scholarship from the Eastman School of Music and first prize in the 1994 International Clarinet Association Composition Competition.
Maroney is a composer, horn player and accompanist. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied composition with Dan Welcher, Karl Korte and Donald Grantham, and studied horn with Wayne Barrington. Now in his second year at the School of Music, he studies composition with Alvin Singleton.
Marshall is a graduate of Bard College in upstate New York, where he studied with Joan Tower and Daron Hagen. He has also studied with George Tsontakis at the Aspen Music Festival and Richard Cornell at the Boston University at Tanglewood Institute. His "Two Pieces for Small Orchestra" was performed by the American Symphony in 1998. He studied for one year at the School of Music with Ezra Laderman, and is currently on leave of absence.
The two other alumni winners of music awards are Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, M.M. '91, currently a faculty member at San Francisco State University, who won a $15,000 Charles Ives Fellowship, and Robert Livingston Aldridge, M.M.A. '97, who won a $5,000 Charles Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award. These awards recognize mid-career composers.
The School of Music has long been a center for composition, where a small and select group of students study closely with faculty members. Students are given ample opportunities and resources for frequent performances of their works. Ezra Laderman chairs the composition program, which in recent years has included among its faculty noted composers Martin Bresnick, the late Jacob Druckman, Ned Rorem and Joseph Schwanter. Each semester, a guest composer serves on the faculty; recent guests have included Anthony Davis, Lukas Foss, Betsy Jolas, Leon Kirschner, Alvin Singleton, David Del Tredici and Charles Wuorinen.
Founded in 1898, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honors over 50 composers, artists, architects and writers each year with cash awards ranging from $2,500 to $75,000. Other activities of the academy are exhibitions of art, architecture and manuscripts, publications on the academy's history and events, and readings and performances of new musicals. Its membership is limited to 250 individuals, and membership is considered the country's highest honor in the arts.
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