PROFESSIONAL GROWTH

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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

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.
INDUSTRY EVENTS AND CONFERENCES
Trade shows, seminars, events and conferences about the business of the performing arts
June 3-8, 2024 Los Angeles, CA Opera America
June 6-8, 2024 Atlanta, GA Chorus America Conference
June 16-19, 2024 Orlando, FL American Harp Society Conference
June 17-22, 2024 Fullerton, CA Guitar Foundation of America Convention
June 20-22, 2024 Chicago, IL Theatre Communications Group National Conference
June 28 - July 2, 2024 Knoxville, TN National Association of Teachers of Singing Conference
June 30 - July 4, 2024 San Francisco, CA American Guild of Organists
July 21-25, 2024 Flagstaff, AZ International Double Reed Society Annual Conference
July 31 - August 4, 2024 Dublin, Ireland ClarinetFest Conference 2024
August 1-4, 2024 San Antonio, TX National Flute Association Conference
October 17-26, 2024 Virtual Society for Ethnomusicology Conference
November 7-9, 2024 Washington, DC College Music Society National Conference
November 7-10, 2024 Jacksonville, FL Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting
November 11-16, 2024 Montréal, QC CINARS (International Exchange for the Performing Arts) 
November 14-17, 2024 Chicago, IL American Musicological Society Annual Conference
November 22-26, 2024 Chicago, IL National Association of Schools of Music Annual Meeting
February 26 - March 2, 2025 Chattanooga, TN American Bandmasters Association Annual Convention
March 5-8, 2025 Columbus, OH US Institute for Theatre Technology Annual Conference
March 15-19, 2025 Minneapolis, MN Music Teachers National Association National Conference
May 19-23, 2025 New Orleans, LA Acoustical Society of America 188th Meeting
June 17-20, 2025 Chicago, IL Dance/USA Annual Conference
August 7-10, 2025 Atlanta, GA National Flute Association Conference
October 23-26, 2025 Atlanta, GA Society for Ethnomusicology Conference
October 30 - November 1, 2025 Spokane, WA College Music Society National Conference
November 4-9, 2025 Minneapolis, MN American Musicological Society Annual Conference
November 6-9, 2025 Minneapolis, MN Society for Music Theory Annual Meeting
March 18-21, 2026 Long Beach, CA US Institute for Theatre Technology Annual Conference

Ask Edna
Edna Landau’s blog
Edna LandauEdna 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.

Arts Administration

Career Etiquette

Communicating with Your Audience

Finding a Manager

For Chamber Music Ensembles

Listening to Your Inner Voice

Managing Your Own Career

Publicity and Promotion

The Orchestral World

When It Comes to Recording

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.”

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People in the News

New Artist of the Month: Composer Kari Watson

February 1, 2025 | By Hannah Edgar, Musical America

Kari Watson claims to be tired, but you wouldn’t guess it, apart from the sheepish acknowledgment and an occasional yawn. In a conversation at a café on Chicago’s West Side, Watson confessed to being up late copying scores for one of four recent commissions, this one for the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble. But the 26-year-old composer talks about that project, and all the rest, with inextinguishable excitement.

“I feel like I'm constantly surprised and delighted by sound,” Watson gushes. “My [musical] questions are iterating well, even if I feel like I'm hitting some duds sometimes.”

Probably only Watson considers them “duds.” Flush with commissions and nods from the Washington Post (“23 for ’23”), BMI (Student Composer Award), and the the prestigious Kranichstein Music Prize in 2023 (from Germany’s Darmstädter Ferienkurse), Watson has been working more or less at this breakneck pace, and across various mediums. They—Watson uses they/them pronouns—compose acoustic music, electronic music, and especially music that melds the two; music for large ensemble, chamber ensemble, and solo configurations; and music that runs the gamut from through-composed to improvised.

To state the obvious, Watson is busy—but not too busy to explore a new facet.  Since moving to Chicago, they have begun improvising on analog synthesizers. Watson now performs solo, as well as in a duo with cellist Katinka Kleijn.

“I can hear [an improvisatory] influence in their music,” says Kleijn, a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the Chicago Symphony. “There's an element of flow and naturalness that I think you have when you're also an active improviser.”

Another era

The Watson of 10 years ago, they insist, would never have seen all of this coming. Watson grew up outside Boston and studied voice—though, they “never felt comfortable as a performer” until recently. If someone in the family was going to compose, it probably would have been Watson’s twin sister, Jesi. Jesi was an accomplished pianist and turned her sibling onto early music, still an abiding love. (At one point during our conversation, Watson proudly flashed a tattoo of the medieval polymath Hildegard von Bingen on their forearm.)

“She was organized, really good at school…. She was grounded. She'd do something until it was done really well,” Watson says. “Meanwhile, I was kind of a mess and floating around. I wasn't detail-oriented. She would always tell me I was smart, but it was hard to feel smart with everything going on.”

“Everything” was Jesi’s cancer, which she fought for five years. Kari was often her main caretaker before she died at 16. While grieving, Watson lost interest in everything except music—the hobby the twins shared.

“It relates me to this person I love, who is also part of me. It's something that's given me a life on my own two feet, after that huge question mark of what life means anymore,” Watson says. “It’s hilarious to me that I'm now doing my Ph.D., because she was always the one that people expected to be the ‘smart twin.’ Now I’m living some hybrid life, like I've learned to fill in these characteristics that she had.”

After graduating with a B.M. from Oberlin, Watson matriculated at the University of Chicago in 2020; their research probes the intersection of electronically altered voices in music and gender performance. Since then, Watson has been seemingly omnipresent in the city’s contemporary classical and experimental scenes, whether that’s composing for ~Nois Saxophone Quartet, appearing on the heavy-hitting Frequency Festival, or having a piece commissioned and premiered by the Civic Orchestra of Chicago. Their first formal foray into music with modular synthesizers was as recently as 2023, with to like down in still waters of erasure [see video below]. Watson wrote the work for organ and spatialized electronics, including manipulated and AI voices.

Watson’s debut anthology album enclosures, released last month, is a sampling of works composed in 2022 and 2023, from solo pieces for harp and just-intonation vibraphone to a three-movement work recorded by the formidable French ensemble Quatuor Diotima. What with Watson’s creative growth spurt of late, enclosures already feels more archival than retrospective.

“What I'm doing now is like the happiest life I could have imagined for myself— in fact, happier than I could have imagined, because I believed that I would never be okay and be devastated forever,” Watson says. “No one saw this coming, including me.”

 

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