Prize Recipients

The Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University proudly announces commission winners for 2020. After reviewing 689 submissions from 44 countries, the judging panel awarded Christopher Trapani of New York, NY, the $12,000 Barlow Prize to compose a major new song cycle for soprano and piano. A former winner of the Rome Prize, Gaudeamus Prize, and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, Trapani maintains an active career in the United States, the United Kingdom, and in Continental Europe. Commissions have come from the BBC, the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and Radio France, and his works have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Ruhrtriennale, IRCAM, and Wigmore Hall. Trapani describes his music as weaving “American and European stylistic strands into a personal aesthetic that defies easy classification. Snippets of Delta Blues, Appalachian folk, dance band foxtrots, shoegaze guitar effects, and Turkish makam [along with] spectral swells and meandering canons.”(www.christophertrapani.com)