Composer Lembit Beecher Awarded 2025-2026 Rome Prize by the American Academy i

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 American Academy in Rome Honors Composer 
Lembit Beecher with a 2025-2026 Rome Prize

Beecher will Deeply Engage with his Work and Collaborate With Artists and
Scholars Across Disciplines During this Prestigious Fellowship in Italy

“his musical invention is astonishing…” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

www.lembitbeecher.com
 

Rome, Italy; New York, NY (April 23, 2025) – The American Academy in Rome announced today that Estonian-American composer and animator Lembit Beecher has won a 2025-2026 Rome Prize, the rigorous competition supporting innovative fellows in the arts, humanities, and sciences. The Rome Prize equips artists and scholars with the time, space, setting, and colleagues to explore and create in the singular city of Rome. The 35 recipients will reside at the Academy’s 11-acre grounds in the Eternal City for five to ten months, starting this September. Beecher will be working on his original composition, A Book of Falsehoods.

“The Rome Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious fellowship programs and provides the rare opportunity for scholars and artists across a range of sub-fields to collaborate with each other,” said Peter N. Miller, President of the American Academy in Rome. “Presented with the opportunity to deeply engage with their work and with that of the other fellows, Rome Prize winners return home with perspectives profoundly enriched by their immersion in an interdisciplinary community set in Rome. The winners form the heart of the Academy, embodying its ethos and extending its international impact through their work now and into the future.”

During his residency in Rome, Beecher plans to compose a large-scale piece for solo horn and sinfonietta focused on the act of translation and the emotional weight it carries. For over 20 years, Beecher’s mother, who is Estonian, worked on translating Jaan Kross’s epic novel Between Three Plagues into English; the final book of her three-volume translation, A Book of Falsehoods, was published in 2022. Beecher’s piece will be written for hornist Eric Reed and the New York City-based Ensemble Échappé.

“I will spend my year in Rome writing a piece that draws inspiration from the text of my mother’s translation, including the speech rhythms of Estonian and English, the history of 16th Century Estonia as portrayed in the novel, as well as my mother’s extended and methodical work process,” Beecher says. “I am particularly interested in the many layers of emotion and identity that are carried in the nuances of language and translation, especially for people, like my mother, who live multilingually as part of a diaspora, having been displaced from their homelands.”

“Fellows credit their time at the Academy with reshaping their understanding of their disciplines, inspiring them to think more broadly and act more boldly in their creative and scholarly endeavors,” said Calvin Tsao, Chair of the Board of Trustees for the American Academy in Rome. “For decades, the most promising American scholars and artists have honed their craft at the Academy and have been transformed into luminaries for their disciplines. We are committed to supporting this evolution for years to come.”

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. This year’s competition received 990 applications from applicants in 44 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 17 different countries. The acceptance rate was 3.54 percent. The recipients range from 28 to 71 years old, with an average age of 45.

This year, the American Academy in Rome introduces a pilot Rome Prize dedicated to the Environmental Arts & Humanities, designed specifically for collaborative efforts between artists and scholars working jointly on projects that help expand our understanding of the way human beings relate to, experience, and process their encounters with the natural world.

About Lembit Beecher
Estonian-American composer and animator Lembit Beecher writes “hauntingly lovely and deeply personal” music (San Francisco Chronicle) that stems from a fascination with the ways memories, histories, and stories permeate our contemporary lives. Threading together fragments of family lore, distantly experienced legends, imagery, and songs from Estonian folk culture, and explorations of place, migration, natural processes, and ecology, he has created an idiosyncratic and thoughtful musical language full of fragile lyricism, propulsive energy, and visceral emotions, which draws raves for its “astonishing musical invention” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) and “exquisite touches” (San Francisco Chronicle). 

Speaking Estonian with his mother and English with his father, Lembit grew up under the redwoods of the California Central Coast, a few miles from the wild Pacific. A childhood filled with family stories of homeland, migration, and displacement led to an interest in documentary, and beginning with his 2009 documentary oratorio And Then I Remember, Lembit has created numerous works incorporating interviews and personal testimonies into his music, both as recorded audio and as sung text. From song cycles like After the Fires, based on conversations with residents of his home town of Bonny Doon about the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires, to large-scale pieces like Say Home, a 38-minute work for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra that weaves through the musical texture the voices of almost 50 residents of the Twin Cities speaking about the meaning of home, Lembit’s works are grounded in a sense of empathy, exploring the relationship between individual experience and communal understanding. 

Noted for his collaborative spirit and “ingenious” interdisciplinary projects (The Wall Street Journal), Lembit has served three-year terms as the Music Alive composer-in-residence of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the inaugural composer-in-residence of Opera Philadelphia, working with devised theater actors, poets, ethnographers, and engineers, as well as incorporating Baroque instruments, electronically-controlled sound sculptures, homemade speaker systems, and stop-motion animation into his projects. Lembit’s three operas with noted Canadian playwright Hannah Moscovitch have drawn particular acclaim. Starring Frederica von Stade and Marietta Simpson and directed by Joanna Settle, his opera Sky on Swings, which traces the relationship of two women diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, was praised as “a monumental achievement” (Parterre), “theatrically true and artistically distinguished” (The Philadelphia Inquirer), and “a shattering musical and theatrical evocation of what it feels like to have Alzheimer’s disease” (The Wall Street Journal). In 2015 he received a major grant from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to develop and produce Sophia’s Forest, a chamber opera for soprano Kiera Duffy, the Aizuri Quartet, and a multi-piece sound sculpture, built in collaboration with architects and engineers at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University's ExCITe Center. 

Recent premieres include Tell Me Again for cellist Karen Ouzounian and the Orlando Philharmonic; A Year to the Day, a song cycle with librettist Mark Campbell, written for tenor Nicholas Phan and violinist Augustin Hadelich; and string quartets for the Juilliard, Aizuri and Lydian quartets, in addition to works for cellist Seth Parker Woods, bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann, and mezzo Sasha Cooke. The Grand Prize Winner of the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award, Lembit was a graduate fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Denison University, and has been in residence at the Copland House, MacDowell, Bogliasco Foundation, Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, White Mountains Festival, Scrag Mountain Music, and the Decoda Skidmore Chamber Music Institute.

Lembit has lived in Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, Berlin, New York and Philadelphia, earning degrees from Harvard, Rice and the University of Michigan where his primary teachers included Evan Chambers, Bright Sheng, Karim Al-Zand, Pierre Jalbert, Kurt Stallmann and Bernard Rands. Active also as a pianist and animator, Lembit has created stop-motion animations for the Experiential Orchestra, Aizuri Quartet, Decoda, Music on the Strait, and violinist/composer Michelle Ross. For 2023-24, Lembit served as a Visiting Artist-Teacher at the Hartt School at the University of Hartford. He lives in Washington Heights, New York with his wife, cellist and composer Karen Ouzounian. Learn more at lembitbeecher.com.

About the American Academy in Rome
Since 1894, the American Academy in Rome has functioned as a residential center for research and creativity. Its purpose has always been to enable highly motivated scholars and artists to immerse themselves in the experience of Rome, ancient and modern, and to be inspired by daily exchange with the other members of this creative community. The Academy has made an outsized impact on the intellectual and cultural life of the United States, and its Fellows and Residents have been recognized with 622 Guggenheim Fellowships, 74 Pulitzer Prizes, 54 MacArthur Fellowships, 26 Grammy awards, 5 Pritzker Prizes, 9 Poet Laureate appointments, and 5 Nobel Prizes. Approximately 35 Fellows are selected as winners of the Rome Prize each year by rotating juries in the different fields.

Photo Credit: Ebru Yildiz

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