Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 15, 2002

Volume 30, Number 22

Two-Week Issue

American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards

Three current students at the School of Music and two of the school's alumni have won music awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Yale affiliates are among 17 composers given awards totalling $175,000. The candidates were nominated by the members of the academy. Nominees were asked to submit two musical scores, and winners were selected by a committee of academy members. The awards will be presented at the organization's annual ceremonial in May.

Three of the six winners of this year's Charles Ives Scholarships honoring composition students of great promise are at the Yale School of Music, and two of the four recipients of the Academy Awards in Music, which acknowledge composers who have arrived at their own "voice," are Yale alumni.

The Ives Scholarship winners -- Nancy J. Kho, Nathan Michel, and Gregory Spears -- will each receive $7,500. The alumni composers -- Daniel Becker '00 D.M.A. and Cindy McTee '78 M.M. -- will be given $7,500 toward the recording of one work.

Profiles of the winning Yale affiliates (in alphabetical order) follow:

Daniel Becker also holds two master's degrees in composition from Yale, where he worked and studied with Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Poul Ruders, Louis Andriessen and Terry Riley. Becker has written music for the concert hall as well as for experimental dance, film and theater. He is the founder and artistic director of the Common Sense Composers' Collective, where he has collaborated with a variety of ensembles. A compact disc of the pieces resulting from the collective's first project was released in 1997 by CRI on their acclaimed Emergency Music series.

Nancy J. Kho is a native of Cerritos, California, who holds a bachelor's degree in music composition from Indiana University and has studied at Northwestern University. Her other awards include a BMI Student Composer Award, three ASCAP Young Composer Awards, Yale's Martha Curtis Miles Award and Harriet Gibbs Fox Memorial Prize, the Ellen Taaffee Zwilich Award for Women Composers and the Sigma Alpha Iota Scholarship to the Aspen Music School. Her teachers at Yale include Joseph Schwantner, Ezra Laderman and Claude Baker.

Cindy McTee is a professor of music composition at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. In addition to Yale, she attended Pacific Lutheran University (B.M.), the University of Iowa (Ph.D.) and the Academy of Music in Krakow, Poland, where she studied for a year with Krzysztof Pederecki. Her compositions have been performed by leading orchestras, bands and chamber ensembles in the United States, Japan, South America and Europe. She won the 2001 Louisville Orchestra Composition Competition and in 2002 was selected to participate with the National Symphony Orchestra in the "Music Alive" residency program. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Fulbright foundations, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nathan Michel hails from Charleston, South Carolina. He earned his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College and did postgraduate work at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with Louis Andriessen. His other honors include an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers honorable mention, an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, the Rena Greenwald Memorial Prize from the Yale School of Music and a Rena Greenwald Memorial Fellowship from Yale. His principal teachers at the School of Music are Ezra Laderman and Martin Bresnick.

Gregory Spears of Virginia Beach, Virginia, is a Virgil Thompson Scholar at the School of Music, where his teacher is Martin Bresnick. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree at the Eastman School of Music, where he was a Rogers Scholar, received the Bernard Rogers Prize and won the McCurdy Award for outstanding compositional activity. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Royal Danish Academy of Music and also studied at the Norfolk, Bowdoin and Tanglewood summer music festivals. He has won two BMI Student Composer Awards and two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 to "foster, assist and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts." Its membership is limited to 250, and election is considered the country's highest honor in the arts.

The Yale School of Music has long been a center for composition where a small and very select group of students study with renowned faculty and guest composers. Students are provided with numerous opportunities and resources to perform their work.

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