Max Lu Highlighted by Composers' Awards

BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) and the BMI Foundation (BMIF) announced the 71st Annual BMI Composer Awards winners on May 15th.

Among the six winners, 21-year-old Max Lu, one of the youngest winners, also won several awards in this competition. Composed in 2022, his award-winning piece, arboreal, was composed for orchestra.

The award ceremony and the banquet were held in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. The award presenters included Deirdre Chadwick, BMI Executive Director for Classical Music and BMI Foundation President, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, permanent chair of the BMI Composer Awards, and David Levin, BMI’s Senior Vice President on Licensing.

Established in 1985, the BMIF is a non-profit organization that aims to promote the composing, rehearsal, and research of music in the United States.

Formerly known as the BMI Student Composer Awards, the BMI Composer Awards recognizes outstanding young composers annually with a $20,000 prize. This year, BMI received pieces from over 500 applicants around the globe in its anonymous review process. Since its creation in 1951, BMI has awarded over 600 young composers for their significant contributions to music.

The final judges of the competition were George Lewis, Kevin Puts, and Elena Ruehr.

Different from previous editions, this year’s BMI Awards created a brand new award, the Zwilich Award, to honor the female composer and the permanent chair of the BMI Composer Awards, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. As the first winner of this “top award,” Max Lu also won the Carlos Surinach Award, an award given to the youngest BMI award winner.

Other than Max Lu, the rest five winners are Christian-Frédéric Bloquert (age 26), Christopher Enloe (age 26), Seare Ahmad Farhat (age 26), Natasha Frank (age 25), and Sofia Jen Ouyang (age 22) who is also a student of Andrew Norman at Julliard.

At the award ceremony, the Cincinnati New Music Ensemble performed award-winning pieces from BMI’s 2022 edition.

As the youngest of the six prize winners, Max Lu has won several prestigious awards recently, including the Juilliard Arthur Friedman Prize, the American Prize, the NYO-USA Awards, and the Morton Gould Young Composer Awards. His works were also selected to be performed by the Julliard Orchestra.

Max Lu’s first composition teacher is Yiming Wu, a composer and the founder of the Mayflower Art Center. Max is a Columbia University and Julliard School student studying with Andrew Norman as part of the Columbia-Juilliard exchange.

Max Lu’s works were recently performed by several prestigious orchestras in the US, including the Arizona State University Philharmonia and the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America. As a student double majoring in computer science and music, Max Lu has received much attention from American and Chinese musicians.