CONTESTS & AWARDS
Click on the tabs below to advance your career by searching Contests & Awards, Schools, Festivals, Camps, Service Organizations, and our list of Services and Products, Scholarships and Grants and Events and Conferences.
And be sure to browse the excellent career advice offered by legendary Artist Manager Edna Landau in her Ask Edna blog and the entertainment law experts in their Law and Disorder blog.
US/Canada Arts Administration Degree Programs
Music Schools & Departments
Summer Music Camps & Special Programs
Services & Professional Music Orgs (non-profit)
Performing Arts Industry Events and Conferences
AskEdna: Career Advice blog
Law and Disorder: The Law and the Arts blog
How-to Videos
Scholarships and Grants
Musical America routinely updates the list of scholarships and grants in an effort to keep current and ensure opportunities for musicians.
If you know of a scholarship or grant not mentioned in our lists, please send us a message.
Performing Arts Industry Events and Conferences
Edna Landau—doyenne of the music business, long-time managing director of IMG Artists and director of career development at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles—writes Ask Edna exclusively for MusicalAmerica.com to provide invaluable advice to music students and young professional artists. Read more about Edna’s impact on the performing arts.Send your questions to Edna Landau at AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com and she’ll answer through Ask Edna. Click the links below to read Edna’s recent columns on the critical aspects of launching and managing and professional music career.
Communicating with Your Audience
During Edna’s 23 years as managing director of IMG Artists, she personally looked after the career of violinist, Itzhak Perlman and launched the careers of musicians such as pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang, violinist Hilary Hahn, and conductors Franz Welser-Mõst and Alan Gilbert.
Edna believes young musicians can grow their own careers, with “hard work, blind faith, passion for the cause, incessant networking and a vision that refuse[s] to be tarnished by naysayers.”
Law and Disorder:
Performing Arts Division
The legal blog from GG Arts Law
The law plays an integral part in the performing arts, whether it's dealing with visas, copyrights, contracts, taxes, licensing, employees, venues . . . well, you get the idea.
Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division is written by the attorneys at GG Arts Law. GG specializes in entertainment law as well as visas and immigration issues for foreign artists and performers.
To ask your own question, write to lawanddisorder@musicalamerica.org. Click below to review answers to key questions about the business and law affecting the performing arts.
Law and Disorder: Performing Arts Division
Central Withholding Agreements
How-to Videos
iCadenza helps musicians of all career stages break through challenges and pursue their goals with confidence and joy. Through our individual consulting, workshops, and our Career Development Bootcamp, we help classical musicians develop strong personal brands, create action plans, and sharpen their mental game. We are happy to offer a free 1-hour consultation to readers of Musical America. Send an email and mention MusicalAmerica.com to arrange your free consulation.
Musical America and iCadenza are committed to providing up-to-date career development resources to emerging professional musicians. Send your questions to info@MusicalAmerica.com. You'll find a list of videos below.
Competitions & Awards
Musical America Awards Get Zingy
Lincoln Center’s Kaplan Penthouse was once again the site of Musical America’s annual award celebration last night, honoring the 2013 winners and in the process attracting a large crowd of classical music’s movers and shakers. The event was a bit zingier than usual: Following Publisher Stephanie Challener’s welcoming remarks, the official Trumpet Ensemble of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra launched into a mini recital, a little Gabrieli here, a little Sousa there. The full orchestra is in town to perform as part of Carnegie Hall’s Voices of Latin America festival. The fearless leader of the pack—and of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—sat quietly and listened for a change, later mounting the podium to accept his award as Musical America’s 2013 Musician of the Year. But more about that later.
The 2013 Composer of the Year, David Lang, was the first honoree to be recognized, largely because love fails, his reinterpretation of the Tristan and Isolde story, was opening momentarily at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lang—cofounder of Bang on a Can, occupant next year of Carnegie Hall’s Composer’s Chair—noted that he was also directing the piece, for the first time, and had learned that “when you’re the director, you have to show up.” 
Directory Features Editor Sedgwick Clark introduced the 2013 Educator of the Year as a “visionary, not only in his native Venezuela but throughout the world, as architect of the extraordinary music-education program El Sistema.” José Antonio Abreu himself prefers to think of the music program as more of a “social action project,” through which low-income children can develop a sense of pride and confidence and become not just musicians but, as Clark said, “pillars of society” in all walks of life. Speaking through an interpreter, Abreu expressed his gratitude and called the award an “immense honor.” He went on to say that El Sistema was now also working with children of “great mental deficiency” and in prisons.
“The best measure of her achievement,” said Clark in describing 2013 Instrumentalist of the Year Wu Man, “is that her instrument, the pipa, is no longer an exotic curiosity.” Indeed, contemporary composers have written works with her in mind, and she regularly performs with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, the Kronos Quartet, and as a soloist in Bang on a Can marathons. Wu Man recalled arriving Stateside from Beijing 22 years ago, with not a clue of what to expect. “But I did not give up on my dream. This country offers endless opportunities for musical creation,” she said, noting how much living and working in the U.S. had motivated her to grow as an artist. “I have found new territory for the pipa and for Chinese music.” She said her dream was to bring the instrument out of its traditional role and make it part of the wider musical world. Certainly she is well on her way to achieve that. 
Like Lang, Joyce DiDonato, 2013 Vocalist of the Year, recalled a time (1993) when, as an aspiring performer, she was thumbing through the Musical America Directory. “I found my school there,” she said, the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia. The native Kansan, “America’s own Yankee Diva,” as Clark called her, is a vocal force to be reckoned with, bringing down the house in her Carnegie Hall recital titled “Drama Queens” (a collection of Baroque arias sung by royal characters), and preparing next door at the Met Opera for the title role of Maria Stuarda, which opens on New Year’s Eve.
Clark introduced the 2013 Musician of the Year, a relatively new father and a very proud one at that, by saying, “In eight short years, [he] has become more in demand than any conductor in the world. He is a household name in Los Angeles….He is mobbed in Berlin, Vienna, Milan, London, and Caracas, Venezuela, where he is one of his country’s best known and well-loved celebrities.” (He was mobbed at this event as well when he first arrived, with numerous cell phone cameras held aloft, some taking pictures of photographers taking pictures.) Clark noted, too, that the 31-year-old Gustavo Dudamel is often compared to Leonard Bernstein, with whom he shares “great charisma, tireless advocacy for music education, and expressive music-making.” At 18, Dudamel became music director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. At 23 he won the Bamberg Symphony’s Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition (where, Dudamel remembered, he met and spent considerable time with MusicalAmerica.com’s late Berlin correspondent, Paul Moor). At 27 he became music director of the Gothenburg Symphony, and, at 29, of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
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