Awards Season for PSNY Composers

by Ted Gordon on May 10, 2016, 10:16 p.m.

Four of our PSNY composers—Kate Soper, Timo Andres, Andrew Norman, and Anthony Cheung—have recently been honored with generous and prestigious awards from some of the most well-regarded organizations in America. We're proud that our composers are getting the recognition they very much deserve, and are honored to make their compositions available to the public. 

Timo Andres, well-known for his works for piano, was a 2016 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his work "The Blind Banister," a piece for piano and orchestra that reimagines the cadenza in Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto. Andres writes: "the best way I can describe my approach to writing the piece is: I started writing my own cadenza to Beethoven's concerto, and ended up devouring it from the inside out." Starting from a seemingly simple scalar motive, Andres' composition flows like a hand leading itself on a banister in the dark, echoing Beethoven's sense of purpose-driven confidence but in a world of total sound. 

Kate Soper, as we've mentioned on the blog, has recently won the Virgil Thomson Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This marks the second time this young award has been given; Soper's opera Here Be Sirens is now available on PSNY. Check out a highlight reel below: 

HERE BE SIRENS: Highlight Reel from Kate Soper on Vimeo.

And last but certainly not least, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has recently released their 2016 list of fellows, which includes PSNY composers Andrew Norman and Anthony Cheung. The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded to artists and scholars "who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Norman and Cheung will use their Fellowships to support the composition of new works, and will join the ranks of fellow PSNY Composers Marcos Balter, Richard Carrick, Lei Liang, Keeril Makan, Alex Mincek, and Kate Soper, all of whom have been Guggenheim Fellows in the past decade.  

Richard Carrick Named 2015 Guggenheim Fellow

by Ted Gordon on April 20, 2015, 10:25 a.m.

Richard Carrick has been named a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Music Composition, joining the historic ranks of fellow composers such as Aaron Copland, George Antheil, and countless other American composers throughout the years. Carrick has been hard at work in the past year, releasing a new album on New World Records entitled "Cycles of Evolution", which features instrumentalists from a who's who of contemporary music ensembles in New York: the New York Philharmonic, Either/Or, Hotel Elefant, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and the Toomai String Quartet. The album features several works available through PSNY, including Sub-merge and Adagios, in an arrangement for string orchestra. Check out the String Orchestra of Brooklyn performing Adagios live at St. Ann's Church: 

Prizes, Prizes, Prizes...

by Ted Gordon on April 16, 2012, 3:36 p.m.

It's been an unbelievable past few days: first, the Guggenheim Foundation announced their 2012 Fellows, which included PSNY Composers Keeril Makan, Kate Soper, and Alex Mincek, as well as Schott composer Xiaogang Ye. And just this afternoon, the Pulitzer Prize board announced that Andrew Norman's "The Companion Guide to Rome" was a 2012 Finalist! 

It's not hard to hear why the panel liked Andrew's work so much... 

Oh, and did I mention that you can purchase performance material right here on PSNY? String quartets, get on this!