School Notes: School of Music
July/August 2015

Alumna wins Pulitzer

Julia Wolfe ’86MusM won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in music for her work Anthracite Fields, described by the Pulitzer jury as “a powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the twentieth century.” The work was commissioned with support from Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program. A recording of Anthracite Fields is scheduled to be released this fall on the Cantaloupe Music label, featuring the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street with Julian Wachner conducting. Wolfe spent more than a year creating and researching the work, including visits to museums and interviews with miners. Wolfe, a cofounder of Bang on a Can, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for her piece Steel Hammer. 

Alumni among fellowship winners

Pianist Sean Chen ’14MusAD is among five emerging artists who will receive grants from the Leonore Annenberg Fellowship Fund for the Performing and Visual Arts. The fund awards significant grants to artists who have demonstrated great talent and are on the cusp of a professional breakthrough; he will receive a two-year award of $100,000. Chen, the winner of the American Pianists Association’s DeHaan Classical Fellowship in 2013, won third prize at the 14th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition that same year, becoming the first American to reach the finals since 1997.

Composer Matthew Barnson ’07MusM, ’08MusAM, ’12MusAD, is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2015. He is one of only 11 composers to receive the honor among a diverse group of 175 scholars, artists, and scientists. The candidates, appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, were chosen from a group of over 3,100 applicants.

Violin student wins second prize in Seoul competition

Violinist Suliman Tekalli ’16ArtA was awarded second prize in the Seoul International Music Competition in May, sharing the prize with Japanese violinist Ayana Tsuji. No first prize was awarded in this year’s competition, which takes place annually in South Korea.