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
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
And Now for Something Completely Different: Musical America 2021
The 2021 Musical America International Directory of the Performing Arts is a major departure from the version that first appeared in 1961—and every year since--with Leonard Bernstein on the cover as Musician of the Year. For one thing, there are three, not one, Artists of the Year. For another, they are being celebrated not only for their brilliant contributions to the artform, but also for their efforts to stretch and expand the artform, both artistically and culturally. Which is why they are being honored as Agents of Change: Jamie Barton, Julia Bullock, and Beth Morrison are three women who are unafraid to shake up the status quo and expand the field’s perspectives to broader and brighter horizons.
Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton’s rise to fame has been rapid and highly visible. Eagerly pursued by major international houses, Barton has used her star power to advocate for change in the opera world, for better representation—onstage and off—of people of all shapes, sizes, colors, abilities, and backgrounds.
Soprano Julia Bullock, another quick study, traverses any number of forms and vintages of repertoire, along the way tackling social justice issues head on with her artistry and political savvy. An original thinker involved in a variety of inventive projects and commissions, she has been described by The New Yorker as “a musician who enjoys making her own rules.”
Producer Beth Morrison has been busy breaking the rules of opera since launching Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) in 2006. Through BMP, she has nurtured any number of new works by rising composers, specializing in small-scale, highly flexible stagings with multi-racial casts. Two of BMP’s works have produced Pulitzer Prizes for their composers, Du Yun and Ellen Reid.
Igor Levit, certainly the most intriguing pianist of the year, is being honored for his early defiance of the pandemic via his marathon live-streaming all 840 repetitions of Satie’s Vexations. His stamina, determination, and endurance have been lauded everywhere; he also happens to be an exquisite artist.
There are a couple of other changes to the annual Directory, as well. This will be the first year that it will be entirely digital, and its longtime Features Editor Sedgwick Clark has retired, succeeded by Clive Paget, a former editor of Australia’s Limelight Magazine and a regular contributor to Musical America’s webpages.