BMI Foundation, Inc. / Carlos Surinach Commissions Awarded To Gordon Beeferman and David Schober
Ralph N. Jackson, President of the BMI Foundation, Inc., announced today that Gordon Beeferman and David Schober are recipients of Carlos Surinach Commission awards. They were selected from an impressive pool of young BMI affiliated classical composers, all of whom were recent winners of the BMI Foundation’s prestigious Student Composer Awards program. David Alan Miller, Music Director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, and marimba virtuoso Makoto Nakura served as the judges for the competition.
Miller will conduct the Albany Symphony Orchestra in the premiere of Beeferman’s Morbidity and Mortality Report as part of it’s American Music Festival on March 14th at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Troy, NY. Marimba virtuoso Makoto Nakura will present the US premiere of Schober’s solo marimba work Taepoong in Merkin Hall, New York City on October 14, 2003. The world premiere of the Schober work occurred on March 3, 2003 in Tokyo Japan in a nationally televised (NHK) concert.
According to Jackson “this is a unique competition in which the judges, in this case an orchestra conductor and a solo marimbist, are choosing composers to create works which they will premiere. The Foundation was incredibly lucky to be working with David Alan Miller and Makoto Nakura, two truly remarkable musicians, both of whom are outstanding champions of new American music. Nakura is one of the finest marimbists in the world and has commissioned and performed dozens of new works. And of course, David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony are known world-wide for their fine performances and enduring commitment to new music.”
David Schober was born in 1974 is currently a doctoral candidate and a fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in Ann Arbor. He has received a Theodore Presser Foundation grant to study at Yonsei University in South Korea, two BMI Student Composer Awards, the San Francisco State University Wayne Peterson Composition Prize, the Aaron Copland Award, and a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Commissions have come from the Minnesota Orchestra, the Naumburg Foundation (for the Miró String Quartet), eighth blackbird, violinist Gregory Fulkerson and the Fromm Foundation.
Gordon Beeferman was born in 1976 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music, where he received a B.M. in composition and was awarded the Stanley Medal, the School’s highest undergraduate honor. Beeferman has received three BMI Student Composer Awards (including the 2002 William Schuman Prize) and the BMG/Williams College National Awards to Young Composers Grand Prize, as well as fellowships from Tanglewood and the Copland Heritage Society. He has been awarded grants from the American Music Center and has received commissions from the New York Youth Symphony and guitarist David Leisner. His music has been performed in New York, Minneapolis, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Rome, and elsewhere.
The BMI Foundation Inc./Carlos Surinach Commissions are made possible by a generous legacy from Carlos Surinach, the late composer and conductor, who left his entire estate to the BMI Foundation to be used to support young classical composers. The BMI Foundation, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1985 to support the creation, performance, and study of music, through awards, scholarships, commissions and grants. Tax deductible donations to the Foundation come primarily from songwriters, composers and publishers, BMI employees and members of the public with a special interest in music. Because both the Foundation staff and the distinguished members of the Advisory Panel serve without compensation, over 97% of all donations and income are used for charitable grants.
Visit the BMI Foundation website at bmifoundation.org.
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