The Lotte Lehmann Foundation has a dual mission: to support singers of art song and the composers who write for them. In alternate years since 2005, the Foundation has awarded over $16,000 in prizes to composers under the age of thirty for art song composition; the 2009 competition was judged by distinguished composer board members Larry Alan Smith, Daron Hagen, and Stephen Dembski, along with a guest judge, the noted song and opera composer John Musto.Our partner in this effort is ASCAP, which provides administrative support and hosts in their New York offices the day-long judging. Since this collaborative effort began, the competition has become a prominent source of support for American composers under thirty, and announcements for the competition are received by over 1,600 academic music departments around the country. As Frances Richard, ASCAP Vice President and Director of Concert Music has said, "It is in the great tradition of ASCAP to encourage gifted young composers to set inspiring texts for voice, and we are proud to join with the Lotte Lehmann Foundation in this exciting biannual commissioning program.”
This year’s winners are already scouting around for texts. Zhou Tian, 27, won the $3500 First Prize, a commission to write a song cycle for publication by E.C. Schirmer. “I’m extremely honored to be the winner of the competition. I have always have a passion for vocal music. My dad is a composer (mainly a songwriter) in China and when I was studying at the Curtis Institute I had the opportunity to have many composers meetings with legends such as Ned Rorem in his New York apartment.” For the commission he will compose a cycle of songs based on old Chinese love poems. “Reading them now is like seeing lost treasures. Many old Chinese love poems are incredibly imaginative, subtle, simple and beautiful.”
Like Zhou, Eric Guinivan and Juhi Bansal (both 25), the competition’s second and third-prize winners, respectively, are doctoral students in the composition at the University of Southern California, where they have participated in “Writer and Composer,” a class taught by the composer Frank Ticheli and the poet David St. John. The text for Zhou’s prize-winning song, A Crown for Sonia, concerns the military killings in Argentina during the political turbulence of the 1970s; the text was by a poem by the young poet Seth Michaelson, who is a Ph.D student at USC. Both Guinivan and Bansal (who have also been commissioned to write songs) plan to choose texts that they’ve discovered as part of their in-class collaborations. Joni Greene, 28, was the winner of the Damien Top Prize, a commission to set a poem by the French writer Andrée Brunin.
Cordially,
Linn Maxwell
President
