National Sawdust Announces Call for Scores From Female, Nonbinary, and Trans Composers for Third Annual Hildegard Competition

BROOKLYN, NY (October 21, 2019) — National Sawdust, the Williamsburg music incubator and non-profit, has opened its third call for scores for the annual Hildegard Competition. Named for the seminal medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen, the competition serves as a platform to give outstanding female, nonbinary, and trans composers — voices often underrepresented in the world of new music — opportunities for their work to be recognized. The competition is targeted at composers in the early stages of their careers, providing them with financial resources, a commission, a public performance, recording opportunities, and mentorship from some of the most talented composers working today. For its third edition, the competition will continue to provide mentorship and opportunities for exposure while also examining how gender distorts the lens through which music is perceived. Three winning composers each receive a $7,000 cash prize, a commission, a performance and recording by the new National Sawdust Ensemble led by cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, under the baton of conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, and coaching and mentorship by the judges. All Hildegard Competition winners’ music will be recorded and released on National Sawdust Tracks. The deadline for submitting scores is November 29, 2019; a press release will announce the winners in early February 2020, and the concert featuring the winning compositions, as well as music by the runners-up, will take place in June 2020.

The five renowned artists who acted as judges and mentors for last year’s competition were composer and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of National Sawdust Paola Prestini; composer Tania León; composer and former National Sawdust Artist-in-Residence Angélica Negrón; LCD Soundsystem synthesist, analog synth designer, and former National Sawdust Artist-in-Residence Gavin Rayna Russom; and Pulitzer Prize winner and former National Sawdust curator Du Yun. This season, the roster of judges and mentors includes Prestini, Negrón, Russom, and composer and vocalist Joan LaBarbara. Following the revised mentorship model from last year’s competition, instead of pairing each winner with one mentor, mentoring responsibilities will be shared, to give the winners the benefit of the full range of musical experience represented by the pool of judges. 

Throughout the period leading up to the concert, students will go through a professional development process that mirrors the residency program at National Sawdust. Within these sessions, students will cover issues ranging from intellectual property, improvisation, acoustics, publishing, criticism, and other relevant issues with leading figures in the field, as well as National Sawdust staff. 

Fellows will be encouraged to take advantage of other venue resources, including National Sawdust’s state of the art Meyer Sound Constellation® acoustic system as well as its immersive component Spacemap®, in ways that enhance their compositional process and provide a bridge into their next compositional phase.

To qualify for the Hildegard Competition, all applicants must certify that they have met two of the following three criteria: that they have received no commissions of $7,000 or more, that there are no commercially released recordings of their work, and that there have been no performances of their work by a professional ensemble (except within a university setting). Applicants will be judged on their past compositions and on their curriculum vitae, personal statement, and proposal for a new original chamber work. In an attempt to remove the barriers traditionally faced by composers, neither letters of recommendation nor application fees are required.

The winners of last season’s competition — described by Prestini as a “peer-based mentorship” experience — were inti figgis-vizueta, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, and Niloufar Nourbakhsh. The inaugural winners were X. Lee, Kayla Cashetta, and Emma O’Halloran.

Last season’s winners had many positive things to say about the competition and the opportunities it afforded them. “It’s been an amazing experience being welcomed into such a strong community of adventurous music-makers that National Sawdust comprises, and the support they give through the Hildegard competition is extremely important to up-and-coming composers,” says Snæbjörnsdóttir. “Winning this competition, working with the musicians and staff, and all the additional resources that come along with it almost feels like becoming part of a new family,” Nourbakhsh adds. “This community is unique in its support and warmth and I value its dedication to a wide range of genre and sound,” explains figgis-vizeuta. “As a composer whose career and artistic practice is defined by current social, political, and aesthetic dialogues I have found a much needed well of knowledge and practice of collective learning here.”

Funding for the Hildegard Competition comes in part from a generous grant by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. For submissions and further information, click here.

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About the judges, mentors, and conductor
Through an illustrious career being equal parts creator and connector, composer Paola Prestini is known both for her “otherworldly…outright gorgeous” music (The New York Times), as well as her role as the “visionary-in-chief” (Time Out New York) co-founder and Artistic Director of the non-profit music organization National Sawdust. As the Wall Street Journal says, many recognize Prestini for “pushing the boundaries of classical music through collaborations.” Over 25 large scale artistic works are the result of Prestini joining forces with conservationists, poets, virtual reality film directors, astrophysicists, and puppeteers, resulting in works such as The Hubble Cantata and Aging Magician. For her efforts, Prestini has made a considerable imprint on the artistic ecosystem: her accolades include being named as one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World” (NPR), one of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” (The Washington Post), and a spot on Brooklyn Magazine’s 2019 list of “influencers of Brooklyn culture…in perpetuity” alongside household names like Chuck Schumer and Spike Lee. Organizations that have commissioned and performed her works include the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Barbican Centre, The Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, The Los Angeles Philharmonic, The New York Philharmonic, and Roomful of Teeth, among others. Current large scale works in development include filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu’s eco-documentary music project The Amazon (recently accepted to the Margaret Mead Festival and in development at MASS MoCA); four operas: Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera), Sensorium Ex (Atlanta Opera and Beth Morrison Projects), Silent Light  (Banff’s Opera in the 21st Century), and the monodrama Untitled (inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills produced by National Sawdust Projects and the Kennedy Center); two piano concertos: Hindsight (Lara Downes for the Louisville Symphony and the Oregon Bach Festival), and Four Quartets (pianist Awadagin Pratt, ensembles Roomful of Teeth & A Far Cry); and the string quartet The Red Book (for the Thalea Quartet, commissioned by Caramoor). A graduate of the Juilliard School in composition, Paola Prestini’s music is released on National Sawdust Tracks, Innova, and Tzadik Records. Born in Italy, she currently makes her home in Brooklyn with her son Tommaso and her husband, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler.

Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics, as well as chamber ensembles and orchestras. Her music has been described as “wistfully idiosyncratic and contemplative” and “mesmerizing and affecting,” while the New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise” and “quirky approach to scoring.” Angélica has been commissioned by Bang on a Can All-Stars, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, A Far Cry, Carnegie Hall, So Percussion, and the American Composers Orchestra, among others. Angélica is the composer-in-residence for the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra for their 2018-2019 season. She is a former Artist-in-Residence at National Sawdust, where she completed Chimera, a lip-synch, drag queen opera focused on the intricacies and complexities of identity, and is the first composer-in-residence at the New York Botanical Garden, where she is working on an interactive choral piece which will give voice to the natural world at the Thain Family Forest.

Gavin Rayna Russom is a New York based multimedia artist and composer of electronic music. Using the analog and digital synthesizer, she has produced a body of extremely influential art and music over the last 15 years. She is perhaps best known as the synthesist in the critically-acclaimed band LCD Soundsystem. Much of her work is informed by her deep relationship with the analog synthesizer, a tool she has applied herself to not only as a composer and player, but also as a designer and builder since 1999. Central to Russom’s aesthetic is the search for unity between humanity, machine, and art, which has translated into her designing and building custom analog synthesizers, both for her own music and for others. Known in the electronic community as “The Wizard” for her technical prowess, she has built instruments for the likes of James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), Tim Goldsworthy (UNKLE, The Loving Hand) and Bjorn Copeland (Black Dice).

Composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara is renowned for developing a unique vocabulary of experimental and extended vocal techniques that have influenced generations of other composers and singers. She received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award in 2016. She is the recipient of numerous commissions for multiple voices, chamber ensemble, orchestra, interactive technology, and dance and film sound-scores, including Sesame Street Signing Alphabet (voice with live electronics), broadcast worldwide since 1977, and collaborations with Jóhann Jóhannsson for the feature film score Arrival (2016). La Barbara’s multi-layered textural compositions have premiered at Brisbane Biennial, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Warsaw Autumn, and MaerzMusik Berlin, among other international venues. She is currently composing a new opera, Dreams of Water Beyond One’s Depth, inspired by the lives and work of Virginia Woolf and Joseph Cornell, and a new chamber ensemble commission from New York Philharmonic for Project 19, commemorating the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the US. La Barbara serves on the Artist Faculties of NYU and Mannes/CoPA/The New School.

Russian-American conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya is a fiercely committed advocate for Russian masterpieces, operatic rarities, and contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music. Her strength as an innovative and multi-faceted collaborator has brought together the worlds of puppetry, robotics, circus arts, symphonic repertoire, and opera onstage, and recently united the classical music traditions of India and the West at the United Nations. As Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater, Lidiya is the only woman to hold that title in a multimillion-dollar opera company in the United States. Under her leadership, COT has established the Vanguard Initiative, a three-pronged investment in new opera that includes a two-year residency for emerging opera composers. Committed to developing the next generation of artistic leaders, she also volunteers with Turn The Spotlight, an organization dedicated to identifying, nurturing, and empowering leaders — and in turn, to illuminating the path to a more equitable future in the arts. Lidiya believes that artistic programming can place music within the context of larger social conversations. Her experiences as a refugee inspired her to found the Refugee Orchestra Project, which proclaims the cultural and societal relevance of refugees through music, and has brought that message to hundreds of thousands of listeners around the world. A sought-after speaker, she has led sessions at the League of American Orchestras and Opera America conferences, and recently served as U.S. Representative to the World Opera Forum in Madrid.

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About National Sawdust

National Sawdust’s mission is rooted in music discovery that is open, inclusive, and based in active mentorship of emerging artists, while building new audiences and communities of music devotees. By supporting emerging artists, programming groundbreaking new music in our state-of-the-art Williamsburg venue, and developing and touring new, collaborative music-driven projects, National Sawdust is reshaping the landscape of contemporary music.

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