Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, associate professor at the Eastman School of Music, has received a Fromm Commission, which carries a $10,000 award from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. He is one of only 12 composers selected for the commission, which is considered one of the most prestigious awards in composition.
Sanchez-Gutierrez will write a work which will be premiered by Eighth Blackbird, a sextet critically acclaimed for its performance of new music, at the 2010 Look and Listen Festival in New York City.
“Like most of my work, the Fromm commission will be a response to the visual arts,” said Sanchez-Gutierrez. “The Look and Listen Festival, which takes place not in concert halls, but in New York City art galleries, is the ideal venue for the sort of cross-pollination that interests me.”
The music of Sanchez-Gutierrez has been described as “vigorously organized and highly visceral . . . neither eclectic nor post-modern, nor owing allegiance to any passing fashion.” He has composed works for choir, orchestra and ensembles, film, theater, and television that are performed and recorded frequently in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Sanchez-Gutierrez also was awarded the 2007 Barlow Prize to compose a new work for percussion ensemble and soprano. The work is scheduled to receive its premiere in 2010 in Toronto, Stockholm, and New York City by soprano Tony Arnold with Nexus, Kroumata, and So Percussion, respectively.
The composer’s numerous fellowships and awards have included first prize at the 2004 Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra Composer Competition, the Lee Ettelson Composition Award, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mozart Medal from the governments of Mexico and Austria, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He taught at Yale and San Francisco State University before joining the faculty of the Eastman School in 2003.
This is the second year in a row that an Eastman faculty composer has been awarded a Fromm Commission. Professor Allan Schindler was the recipient of a 2007 award. In addition, Associate Professor Ricardo-Zohn Muldoon won a 2003 commission from the Fromm Foundation.
The Fromm Music Foundation was founded by the late Paul Fromm, founder of the Great Lakes Wine Company and a lifelong patron of contemporary music. Now in its fifty-third year, the foundation has commissioned more than 300 new compositions and their performances and has sponsored hundreds of new music concerts and concert series. The foundation has been located at Harvard University since 1972.
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