The entire Digital Discovery Festival, including composer competition, and all performances and masterclasses, is fully underwritten and supported by the Alphadyne foundation

For Immediate Release —New York, NY — National Sawdust has announced an open call for 20 new works to be commissioned by emerging composers residing or working in the US, as an expansion of its Live@NationalSawdust Digital Discovery Festival, which was launched in April 2020. The commissioning program will feature mentorship by a judges panel of classical music luminaries, professional development sessions with leading musicians, and online premieres of the new works at live.nationalsawdust.org this Fall.

Twenty (20) commissioned composers will receive the following resources: a short commission for $3,000; a performance of their work by either JACK Quartet, renowned string quartet, or members from the National Sawdust Ensemble (Miranda Cuckson, Jeffrey Zeigler, Ian Rosenbaum, Allison Loggins-Hull, Chris Grymes and Stephen Gosling) a new music pierrot ensemble with flexible orchestration and wide-ranging music skills; a recording/film of the live performance; mentorship by the judging panel; and professional development sessions with the musicians.

National Sawdust is deeply grateful to the Alphadyne Foundation for making the Digital Discovery Festival possible. Alphadyne has fully underwritten the Festival which includes the composer competition, performances and masterclasses. This remarkable gift has allowed National Sawdust to support artists directly with financial and technical resources at this very challenging time, while also helping National Sawdust develop its overall digital stage capacity and skills. Reinvention and reimagination in the arts is needed now more than ever, and we are deeply appreciative for Alphadyne’s support which allows us to amplify our mission based work of music discovery and artistic collaboration – to entertain us, educate us and inspire us.

The deadline for submission is June 30th, 2020, a press release will announce the winners in early August 2020, and the two concerts featuring the 20 commissions will take place online as part of the Digital Discovery Festival in the Fall and Spring. 

The roster of judges and mentors include Paola Prestini, composer, Artistic Director and Co-Founder of National Sawdust; Marcos Balter, composer; Ellen Reid, composer, sound artist and Pulitzer Prize winner; Pamela Z, composer, performer, and Frederic A. Juilliard/Walter Damrosch Rome Prize Fellow 2019/2020; Steve Smith, writer, and critic; Jeffrey Zeigler, cellist, and Music Director for the National Sawdust Ensemble and former Kronos Quartet cellist; and JACK Quartet, string quartet.?

Mentoring responsibilities will be shared, which will give the composers the benefit of the full range of musical experience represented by the pool of judges. Each judge will participate in a streamed public workshop in the early Fall.

To be eligible to apply, all applicants are required to certify that they have met two of the following three criteria: that they have received no prior personal/individual commissions of $7,000 or more; that there are no major commercially released full album recordings of their work; that there have been no prior major performances of their work by a professional ensemble in the US, outside of multi-billed concerts, and university setting. Neither letters of recommendation nor application fees are required.

Throughout the period leading up to the concert, commissioned composers will take part in a professional development process that mirrors the residency program at National Sawdust. Within these sessions, composers will explore issues ranging from intellectual property rights, improvisation, acoustics, criticism, and other relevant topics pertaining to their field, in conversations directed by leading figures in the field and National Sawdust staff.

Composers will be trained by National Sawdust staff to use equipment and skills specific to this new time in terms of digital production, in ways that enhance their compositional process and provide a bridge into their next compositional phase.

Previously commissioned composers tell us about the opportunities afforded to them through the commissioning and mentorship process at National Sawdust. The winners of the 2019 Hildegard Composer 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.

“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-vizueta. “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.”

For the submission page on the National Sawdust website, and further information, click here: https://live.nationalsawdust.org/ddf-composer-competition.

Judges Bios

Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that chart her interest in extra-musical themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. Her compositions have been commissioned by and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Barbican Centre, Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Roomful of Teeth, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and Young People’s Chorus of New York City, among others. Upcoming projects include the opera Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera), the chamber opera Sensorium Ex (Atlanta Opera and Beth Morrison Projects Prototype Festival), the foley chamber opera Silent Light (Banff’s Opera in the 21st Century), a piano concerto for Awadagin Pratt and A Far Cry, a piano concerto for Lara Downes and the Louisville Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival, and Ravinia, and music for The Amazon, a documentary and arts event (recently screened at the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the Museum of Natural History). She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Brooklyn based arts institution and incubator, National Sawdust, and as part of her commitment to the next generation and equity, she started the Hildegard Competition for emerging female, trans, and non-binary composers and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers with The Juilliard School. She was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Fellow, and was a graduate of the Juilliard School.

Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. A composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, ensemble and choral writing, she was awarded the the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m. Along with composer Missy Mazzoli, Ellen co-founded the Luna Composition Lab. Luna Lab is a mentorship program for young, female-identifying, non-binary, and gender non-conforming composers. Since the fall of 2019, she has served as Creative Advisor and Composer-in-Residence for Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.
 
Ellen received her BFA from Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. She is inspired by music from all over the globe, and she splits her time between her two favorite cities – Los Angeles and New York. Her music is released on Decca Gold.
 
Praised by The Chicago Tribune as “minutely crafted” and “utterly lovely,” The New York Times as “whimsical” and “surreal,” and The Washington Post as “dark and deeply poetic,” the music of Brazilian composer Marcos Balter is at once emotionally visceral and intellectually complex, primarily rooted in experimental manipulations of timbre and hyper-dramatization of live performance. Recent performances include a Miller Theatre Composer Portrait in 2018 and appearances at Carnegie Hall, Köln Philharmonie, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Lincoln Center, and Walt Disney Hall. Past honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Tanglewood Music Center (Leonard Bernstein Fellow) as well as commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony MusicNOW, Meet the Composer, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, The Holland/America Music Society, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His works are published by PSNY (Schott), and commercial recordings of his music are available through New Amsterdam Records, New Focus Recordings, Parlour Tapes , and Navona Records. He currently lives in New York City, and is an Associate Professor of Music Composition at Montclair State University. For more information, visit the composer's official website at www.marcosbalter.com.
 
Steve Smith has been involved professionally in music and media for more than 30 years, and personally for even longer. Closely associated with contemporary music and living composers, Smith writes regularly for The New Yorker and The New York Times. He recently relaunched his long-running, ASCAP Award-winning blog, Night After Night, as a subscription-based newsletter (nightafternight.substack.com), publishing news, interviews, and reviews twice weekly. Among prior positions, Smith most recently was the inaugural director of publications for the Brooklyn-based concert venue and performing-arts incubator National Sawdust. He served as the editor and lead writer for National Sawdust Log (2016-20), a respected online journal of music journalism and criticism that showcased writing by well-established professionals and gifted emerging writers alike. The Log was recognized for support by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, attesting to the quality the publication achieved during its brief existence. 
 
Smith previously served as an assistant arts editor at the Boston Globe (2014-16), directing coverage of classical and popular music and the visual arts at that esteemed newspaper. As a freelance critic and reporter for The New York Times (2007-14), Smith contributed multiple articles and reviews weekly. At Time Out New York (2001-14), he initially handled classical music coverage, providing many now-prominent new-music artists and organizations with their initial coverage, and eventually assumed oversight for all of the magazine’s music coverage. Smith has embraced an uncommonly broad stylistic range in his music coverage, which has appeared in the Washington Post, Village Voice, Billboard, Musical America, New Music Box, Jazziz, JazzTimes, DownBeat, The Wire, Signal to Noise [RIP], Chamber Music, Symphony, Decibel, and other publications. Along with his work as a writer and editor, he has extensive experience in public relations, radio broadcasting, and public interviewing. Smith trained formally as a percussionist, and put his studies to work with jazz groups in San Antonio, rock bands in Houston and New York, and the Long Island Gilbert & Sullivan Society. He lives in Queens with his wife, the journalist and scholar Lara Pellegrinelli, their daughter, and two charismatic dogs.
 
Jeffrey Zeigler is one of the most innovative and versatile cellists of our time. He has been described as “fiery”, and a player who performs “with unforced simplicity and beauty of tone” by The New York Times. Acclaimed for his independent streak, Zeigler has commissioned dozens of works, and is admired as a potent collaborator and unique improviser. Zeigler is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize, the Polar Music Prize, the President’s Merit Award from the National Academy of Recorded Arts (GRAMMYs), the Chamber Music America National Service Award and The Asia Society's Cultural Achievement Award.
 
Zeigler’s multifaceted career has led to collaborations and tours with a wide array of artists from Yo-Yo Ma and Roomful of Teeth to Tanya Tagaq and Hauschka, and from Philip Glass and John Corigliano to Laurie Anderson and John Zorn. He has also performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Royal Danish Radio Symphony and the Ulster Orchestra under the batons of JoAnn Falletta, Dennis Russell Davies, Peter Oundjian and Dmitry Sitkovetsky. Mr. Zeigler has released dozens of recordings for Nonesuch Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cantaloupe and Smithsonian Folkways and has appeared with Norah Jones on her album Not Too Late on Blue Note Records. Zeigler can also be heard on the film soundtrack for Paolo Sorrentino’s Academy Award winning film, La Grande Bellezza, as well as Clint Mansell’s Golden Globe-nominated soundtrack to the Darren Aronofsky film, The Fountain. Zeigler can also be seen making an on screen cameo performing the music of Paola Prestini in Season 4 of the Amazon Prime Golden Globe Award-winning series Mozart in the Jungle. As a champion of interdisciplinary collaboration, Zeigler is the cellist of the vocal punk band (M)iyamoto is Black Enough alongside slam poetry champion Roger Bonair-Agard, Rome Prize recipient Andy Akiho and drummer Sean Dixon. Zeigler is also featured in a new cello opera entitled Old Man and the Sea directed by Karmina Šilec with music by Paola Prestini and libretto by Royce Vavrek.
 
Jeffrey Zeigler was the cellist of the internationally renowned Kronos Quartet for eight seasons. During his tenure, Zeigler had the opportunity to collaborate with a wide range of luminaries from Henryk Górecki and Steve Reich to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Tom Waits.

National Sawdust Ensemble (NSE), led by cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, is a Pierrot instrumentation ensemble, and a natural culmination of musicians that have performed countless times at National Sawdust. Their mission is to give composers and artists access to the high caliber of musicianship that is native to National Sawdust. 

Hailed by The New York Times as the “our leading new-music foursome”, the JACK Quartet is one of the most acclaimed, renowned, and respected groups performing today. JACK has maintained an unwavering commitment toward performing and commissioning new works, giving voice to underheard composers, and cultivating an ever-greater sense of openness toward contemporary classical music. Over the past season, they have been selected as Musical America’s 2018 “Ensemble of the Year”, named to WQXR’s “19 for 19 Artists to Watch”, and awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

Through intimate relationships with today’s most creative voices, JACK embraces close collaboration with the composers they perform, leading to a radical embodiment of the technical, musical, and emotional aspects of their work. The quartet has worked with artists such as George Lewis, Julia Wolfe, Helmut Lachenmann, Chaya Czernowin, Philip Glass, and many more.

JACK is comprised of violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell. 

About National Sawdust

National Sawdust builds audiences for music by providing outstanding resources and programmatic support to both emerging and established artists and composers. It is both a state-of-the-art performance venue and a recording studio, housed within a preserved century-old sawdust factory. Since the opening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in October 2015, over 170,000 audience members have experienced over 1,200 performances. Centered on discovery within music, National Sawdust's programming strives to introduce audiences to new artists and styles, while also introducing artists to new audiences. As an incubator of new music from across the genre spectrum, National Sawdust provides artists the space, time, and resources they need to create and present their art at its best. Ninety works have been commissioned since its inception, and twenty-six albums have been released through its recording arm, NS Tracks. NS Projects have toured to The Kennedy Center, the Wallis Annenberg, creating a pathway for artists from incubation to dissemination. While our physical doors are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ll actively continue to build community through our free digital platform, Live@NationalSawdust, for all to find joy and inspiration.