Prize Recipients

he Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University proudly announces the 2019 Commission winners. After reviewing 356 submissions from 36 countries, the judging panel awarded Tawnie Olson of New Haven, Connecticut, the $12,000 Barlow Prize to compose a major new work for SATB Choir. The panel also granted Shih-Wei Lo of New York City, New York, the distinction of Honorable Mention.

Canadian citizen Tawnie Olson is a graduate of the University of Toronto, Yale University, and the University of Calgary. Dr. Olson has received commissions from the Canadian Art Song Project, Third Practice/New Music USA, the Canada Council for the Arts, Mount Holyoke College/The Women’s Philharmonic, the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra, Ithaca College, the American Composers Forum, and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music’s Robert Baker Commissioning Fund, among others. In 2017, she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant to develop a new work about Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine with re:Naissance Opera (libretto by Roberta Barker), and a Canada Council for the Arts Professional Development Grant to study field recording at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She is the Composer-in-Residence of the Women Composers Festival of Hartford and an American Composers Forum BandQuest Composer-in-Residence at E.C. Adams School in Guilford, CT. She is the winner of the 2015 Iron Composer Competition, and her Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn took second prize in the 2018 NATS Art Song Competition.

Taiwanese composer Shih-Wei Lo is a Dean’s Fellow in GSAS as well as Kathryn and Shelby Davis International Fellow at Columbia University. Shih-Wei Lo is pursuing a DMA in Composition under the tutelage of Georg Friedrich Haas and George Lewis. He earned his MM in Composition from the University of Washington, where he worked with Huck Hodge and Juan Pampin, and also taught at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS). Prior to the graduate studies in the United States, he studied with Ching-Wen Chao and Kris Falk at National Taiwan Normal University, receiving his BFA in Music Theory and Composition. He has received awards from ASCAP/SEAMUS, the Dutch Harp Festival and Composition Contest, and by the Taiwan Ministry of Education.