<p>This was the 62nd BMI competition. Applicants from all over the world submitted music compositions. Winners were announced in NYC.</p>
<p>The Eight Award Winners:</p>
<p>Ben Wenzelberg- Award for Youngest Composer--Julliard
Age 14</p>
<p>Tie for Outstanding Composition
Mike Boyman--Manhattan School of Music
Phil Taylor--University of Chicago</p>
<p>Sadd Haddad--Thornton School of Music at USC</p>
<p>Daniel Temkin--Thornton School of Music at USC</p>
<p>Grant Luhman--Indiana University</p>
<p>Paul Lewis--University of South Florida</p>
<p>Chris Rogers--Princeton University</p>
<p><a href=“News | BMI Foundation”>http://www.bmifoundation.org/news/62nd_annual_bmi_student_composer_award_winners_announced</a></p>
<p>Its Chris Rogerson at Princeton. (sorry my apostrophe is not working on the keyboard)</p>
<p>Interesting that all the winners are male (submissions are anonymous so this is not a comment on bias, not at all). Does this mean females are less likely to submit to competitions? I think it might. It certainly does not mean that female composers are not doing quality work :)</p>
<p>I sang in Saad’s senior recital last year!
I’d say there are definitely less female composers than male. It’s still a heavily male-driven field and it’s unfortunate. :(</p>
<p>I don’t know if the issue is that there are necessarily fewer females composers at present.</p>
<p>There are simply a lot less woman going into composition IME, it is still very much a male dominated field. Even with the success of composers like Jennifer Higdon and Joan Tower, when it comes to award programs, or the new compositions commissioned for various programs, or the makeup of summer programs with composers, you don’t see a lot of women. I don’t know why…maybe there isn’t enough outreach or young women being recruited, I suspect it is more that there isn’t the effort to get young women to compose rather than teachers and such discouraging them, but I don’t know.</p>
<p>It was interesting to listen to the pieces, and hear some diversity and that some of them actually are tonal. Some to me were the typical earnest student composition pieces I have heard a ton of, others though surprised me that they were not afraid to break from the modern orthodoxy I have seen far too often:)</p>
<p>I’m with @compmom on this one. There are a lot of female composers out there- my school had about a 50/50 male/female split my first year here. And, regarding awards programs (BMI, ASCAP), I know of plenty of people who don’t bother on a basis of principle, so that’s not necessarily the best representation of anything.</p>
<p>There are many very good reasons to avoid these competitions. But congrats to those who did and won…</p>
<p>Musicprnt, do you really think composers are “recruited”? Or that an “effort” needs to be made to “get” women (or men) to compose? No offense, but this sounds like a sport!!</p>
<p>The gender issue in composition is quite complicated, but I agree with musician34 that in 2014, there are many females composing both as students and professionals. From what I gather, many of the twenty-something female composers resist the idea of, say, an all female concert or festival. I think that is a sign of progress.</p>
<p>@ compmom-
I don’t know if they are recruited or not (and in a sense, they are, like with music students, teachers who run across promising students often try to get them to apply to their school). My point is if young women are not represented in composition programs (and all I can talk about is my impressions), if composition programs have a lot of young women in them, that is great, but my point is if they aren’t, if composition is as I see on the other side, with new pieces being composed overwhelmingly by male composers, then part of the solution is encouraging young women to study composition (and that is a big if, if my assumption and experience has seen is true). The kind of recruiting goes on all the time, young women who show an aptitude in the STEM fields are often recruited to go to schools, especially in science and engineering, where women still lag in admissions, or among underrepresented minorities. In music, kids from certain backgrounds get a lot of encouragement to apply to programs, if they are from a background normally not seen in music (in the classical world, for example, kids from a Hispanic or African American background).</p>
<p>I also through my son have been exposed to programs with composition students, and they were routinely 98% male. Again, I am always careful to say in my experience, I don’t have stats on the composition programs, only what I have seen both in programs with student composers and in the ‘outside’ world,and my experience has been that it is heavily, heavily male. </p>
<p>A fascinating article by Alex Ross – “Even the Score: Female Composers Edge Forward.” Indeed, it does appear to be a complicated situation, but things do seem to be (gradually) improving, at least beyond the groves of academe (they may be improving there as well, but I don’t have any knowledge of comp programs): </p>
<p><a href=“Even the Score | The New Yorker”>Even the Score | The New Yorker;
<p>One interesting quote:
“This season, two of the city’s strongest new-music series—Composer Portraits, at Miller Theatre, directed by Melissa Smey, and the Ecstatic Music Festival, curated by Judd Greenstein—have offered glimpses of a world in which the “woman composer,” in the embattled-minority sense, has ceased to exist. Three of the eight portraits in the Miller season have been devoted to women: Gubaidulina, Olga Neuwirth, and Rebecca Saunders. The Ecstatic festival, which presented ten concerts at Merkin Hall, featured as many women as men, with particular attention given to such composer-performers as Shara Worden, Carla Kihlstedt, and Imani Uzuri. In both cases, the choices were logical extensions of a governing philosophy that had nothing to do with gender: Smey is determined to keep New Yorkers informed about European trends, and Greenstein is immersed in the genre-bending ethic of Brooklyn’s music scene.” </p>