NEWS RELEASE

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
ANNOUNCES 2006 MUSIC AWARD WINNERS

Eighteen Composers Receive Awards Totaling $195,000

Academy Awards in Music

Benjamin H. Danks Award

Wladimir and Rhoda Lakond Award

Goddard Lieberson Fellowships

Walter Hinrichsen Award

Charles Ives Fellowships

Charles Ives Scholarships

Biographies of 2006 Award Winners in Music

Margaret Brouwer (Academy Award) won a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Ford Foundation grant, and three Meet the Composer prizes. She has had residencies at the Composers Conference at Wellesley College, MacDowell Colony, and Bellagio Center. Her music has been performed by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, Cassatt Quartet, Cavani Quartet, Anne Marie McDermott, Tara O'Connor, Richard Stolzman, the St. Louis Symphony, and the Seattle Symphony. She is the head of the composition department of Cleveland Institute of Music.

Anthony Cheung (Charles Ives Fellowship) is a native of San Francisco. He received an AB in music and history from Harvard College in 2004, and is a pursuing a doctorate in composition at Columbia University. While at Harvard he studied composition with Bernard Rands and piano with Robert Levin. He has studied at Fontainebleau and Acanthes summer courses, and was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. His compositions have been played by the Minnesota Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, Dinosaur Annex, the New York Youth Symphony, and the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. His honors include a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two ASCAP Morton Gould awards.

Jacob Cooper (Charles Ives Scholarship) studies composition at Yale School of Music, where his teachers have included Martin Bresnick and Ezra Laderman. He was born and raised in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York and graduated from Amherst College. He was a fellow at the Bang-on-a-Can Summer Institute and has attended a residency program at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Shawn Crouch (Charles Ives Scholarship) graduated from Yale School of Music, New England Conservatory of Music, and Berklee College of Music. His principal teachers have been Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, and Malcolm Peyton. He has attended the Tanglewood Music Center and Norfolk Contemporary Music Festival.

Tamar Diesendruck (Academy Award) was born in Tel Aviv and raised in New England. She studied fine arts and music at Brandeis University. She earned her MM and PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, Fromm Foundation, and the Pro Arte Quartet, among others. Diesendruck is Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. She has taught at Berklee College of Music, New England Conservatory of Music, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Pennsylvania Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Goddard Lieberson fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Diesendruck is a recipient of the Rome Prize.

David Froom (Academy Award) is a native of California. His music has been performed by the Louisville, Seattle, and Utah orchestras, the Navy and Marine Bands, Speculum Musicae, the Ciompi String Quartet, Music Today, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, Dinosaur Annex, the League of Composers/ISCM, and Earplay. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, commissions from the Fromm, Barlow, and Koussevitzky Foundations, the Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards First Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Individual Artist Awards from the state of Maryland, a Charles Ives Scholarship, a Fulbright grant, and fellowships to the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. He is professor of music at St. Mary's College of Maryland. Mr. Froom was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and Columbia University.

Michael Hersch (Lieberson Fellowship) has been the recipient of First Prize in the American Composers Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Composition, the Rome Prize, and the Berlin Prize. He has been commissioned and performed by the orchestras of Pittsburgh, Dallas, St. Louis, Baltimore, Oregon, violinist Midori, and pianist Garrick Ohlsson. Members of the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, the String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Chamber Symphony, the CBC Vancouver Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, Colorado Music Festival and the Grant Park Music Festival have also performed his works. He was a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, the Norfolk Festival, and the Pacific Music Festival. He is a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

Steven Hoey (Charles Ives Scholarship) is a PhD candidate in composition at University of California at San Diego. He earned his MFA from California Institute of Arts, an AB from Harvard University, and was a Marshall Scholar at University of Oxford. He has been a fellow at the Wellesley Composers Conference, and has also studied at Aspen Center for Composition Studies. He has received a Meet-The-Composer Grant, and is Associate Instructor in the department of music at University of California at San Diego.

Philip Lasser (Hinrichsen Award) is a member of the composition faculty at the Juilliard School and Director of EAMA Summer Music Programs in Paris of the European American Musical Alliance. He holds a BA summa cum laude from Harvard College, an MA from Columbia University and a DMA from Juilliard where he studied with David Diamond. His commissions include Circle of Dreams for Maestro Gerard Schwarz and The New York Chamber Symphony, choral works for the 92nd St. Y, numerous works for The Bachanalia Chamber Orchestra, The Manchester Music Festival, the String Orchestra of New York (SONYC), and cellist Zuill Bailey. His Prelude and Double Fugue premiered with the Seattle Symphony. Dr. Lasser's works are published by Editions Max Eschig in Paris and by Rassel Editions in New York.

Robinson McClellan (Charles Ives Scholarship) is pursuing pre-doctoral studies in composition at the Yale School of Music and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where his teachers are Martin Bresnick, Ezra Laderman, and Aaron Jay Kernis. He earned his Bachelor's degree in composition from Vassar College. He was been commissioned by organist Carson Cooman, Yale Schola Cantorum, the vocal trio Eos, and Christ Church of New Haven, CT.

Justin Messina (Charles Ives Scholarship) has had his works performed at Alice Tully Hall, Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, London's Duke's Hall, Indiana University, CalArts, the University of Illinois and at the Aspen and California Summer Music Festivals. Messina's work Creating Raymond Bell was performed by the New Juilliard Ensemble and the Royal Academy of Music's Manson Ensemble. Born in Southern California, Justin Messina's early interest in music led to studies with composers Miguel del Aguila, Don Freund, P. Q. Phan, Sven-David Sandstrom, and Christopher Rouse. Currently, Messina is enrolled in the doctoral program at the Juilliard School.

John Musto (Lakond Award) has received two Emmys and two CINE Awards for his scores written for television. He was awarded a Rockefeller fellowship at Bellagio, Italy, and was featured on the Great Performers series at Lincoln Center and the Composer Portrait series at Columbia's Miller Theater. Recent commissions have included Carnegie Hall, Chanticleer, the Metropolitan Museum, the Vail Valley Music Festival and the Wolftrap Foundation. His Passacaglia for large orchestra was premiered by the Dallas Symphony and his comic opera, Volpone, was premiered at the Wolf Trap Opera Company. John Musto has been a Visiting Professor at Brooklyn College and is a frequent guest lecturer at the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music.

Jonathan R. Pieslak (Lieberson fellowship) earned his PhD from the University of Michigan, where he also received Master of Music degrees in Music Theory and Composition. His music has been performed and broadcast with Radio Resita (Resita, Romania), the Oberlin College Concert Choir, the Oregon Bach Festival, the University Symphony Orchestra of the University of Michigan. He has received commissions from the Jerome Foundation, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, National Federation of Music Clubs, MacDowell Colony, Diana Barnhart Vocal Composition Contest, Archmere Academy, Richard Ross Music Award, State of Delaware, and the Hilton Head Jazz Society. He currently teaches music at The City College, CUNY.

Marta Ptaszynska (Danks Award) is Professor in Music and Humanities at the University of Chicago, and has taught at Indiana University, Northwestern University, the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, the University of California in Berkeley and Santa Barbara, and at Bennington College. Her works have been performed at the ISCM World Music Days, the International Festival ''Warsaw Autumn,'' the Gulbenkian Foundation Festival, the International Percussion Forum, the New Music Forum, the Huddersfield New Music Festival, Prix Futura, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, Heidelberg Contemporary Music Festival, the Salzburg Festival, Aspen Music Festival, the International Conventions of Percussive Arts Society, and the Vratislavia Cantans Oratorio Festival. She has been commissioned by the BBC, Sudwestdeutche Rundfunk, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Polish Chamber Orchestra, the Pacifica String Quartet and International Caramoor Music Festival, Evelyn Glennie, the Cincinnati Symphony, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Adam Schoenberg (Charles Ives Scholarship) earned his BM in composition from Oberlin Conservatory of Music and his M M from The Juilliard School. He is currently a doctoral student at The Juilliard School, where he studies with Robert Beaser. Other teachers have included Jeffrey Mumford, Lewis Nielson, and George Tsontakis. His awards include an ASCAP Film Music Fellowship and the Society for New Music's Brian M. Israel Prize. He has been commissioned by the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra, the Juan Morel Campos IS71, by trumpeter Jack Sutte of the Cleveland Orchestra, for harpist Gretchen Van Hoesen of the Pittsburgh Symphony, a solo vibraphone piece for Nick Tolle and the consortium of vibraphone players, and a work for the American Brass Quintet.

Yevgeniy Sharlat (Charles Ives Fellowship) is a Visiting Lecturer in Composition at University of Texas at Austin. He earned his MMA and MM at Yale University and his BM at Curtis Institute. His honors include a Morton Gould Young Composers Award from ASCAP and Yale University's Greenwald Prize.

Scott Wheeler (Danks Award) studied at Amherst College, New England Conservatory, and Brandeis University (PHD). His principal teachers include Arthur Berger, Lewis Spratlan, and Malcolm Peyton. He has also studied at the Tanglewood Music Center with Oliver Messiaen, at the Dartington School with Peter Maxwell Davies, and privately with Virgin Thomson. He co-founded the Dinosaur Annex in 1975. His honors include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He has been a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He has been commissioned and performed by the orchestras of Minnesota, Houston, Toledo, and Indianapolis, New York City Opera, Renee Fleming, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, and the Newport Music Festival.