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.
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Scholarships and Grants
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.”
Competitions & Awards
Sphinx Organization Honors Three for Excellence
This year's Sphinx Medals of Excellence, the eighth annual round, will go to double bassist Joseph H. Conyers [pictured], soprano Raquel Gonzalez, and baritone Will Liverman. Designed specifically to honor Black/Latinx artists, the awards, which carry a $50,000 career development grant, recognize individuals who demonstrate “artistic excellence, outstanding work ethic, a spirit of determination, and ongoing commitment to leadership.”
Asked how and by whom they are chosen, Sphinx President and Artistic Director Afa Dworkin wrote in an email, “A national confidential nominating committee puts forward a pool of nominations. Then a separate smaller confidential committee makes final determinations, facilitated by me.”
Awardees are to be recognized next March at a black-tie dinner hosted by the Kennedy Center and The Aspen Institute.
Joseph H. Conyers is a 2004 Sphinx Competition laureate now in his eighth season as assistant principal bassist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He is a member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and is the 2018 recipient of his orchestra’s highest honor, the C. Hartman Kuhn Award. A music-education advocate, Conyers is music director of Philadelphia’s All-City Orchestra; executive director of Project 440, a leadership program for young musicians; and on the faculty of Temple University.
Raquel González was a Toulmin Foundation Scholar at the Juilliard School, from which she holds a master’s degree. She just completed three seasons as a Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist at Washington National Opera, where she sang several major roles. She made her debut at Lyric Opera of Kansas City, her hometown, last season, singing Tatyana in a new production of Eugene Onegin.
Will Liverman, also a Juilliard grad, recently received the 3Arts Award for Chicago-based artists, and has won top prizes in competitions including the George London Foundation, the Gerda Lissner, and the Sullivan Foundation. Recent roles include Dizzy Gillespie in Charlie Parker’s Yardbird with Opera Philadelphia; Marcello in La Bohème at Portland Opera; and Andrew Hanley in Kevin Puts’s The Manchurian Candidate at Minnesota Opera. He makes his Met Opera debut in the coming season.