2108 Hildegard Competition
Competition Overview
National Sawdust (NS), with generous support from the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation, has announced the winners of its Hildegard Competition for emerging women and non-binary composers.
In addition to receiving a $7,000 cash prize, winners will receive coaching from three critically acclaimed composers: National Sawdust Artistic Director Paola Prestini and National Sawdust Curators Angélica Negrón and Du Yun. Following this coaching, the works will be performed live and recorded in National Sawdust’s state of the art venue by Lidiya Yankovskya and the Refugee Orchestra at a public performance in Summer 2018. Newly commissioned works of the winners will be presented alongside existing works of the competition’s runners up.
The winners: Kayla Cashetta, Emma O’Halloran, and X. Lee.
The runners up: Camila Agosto, Alexis Bacon, Amy Brandon, Diana Soh, Akshaya Tucker, and Elena Rykova.
2018 Winners
Kayla Cashetta is a composer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Inspired by acoustics, new technologies, and the human experience, she strives to explore the intricacies of inner life and interpret them through sound. Past and current projects include concert works, electronic music, and collaborations with dancers, filmmakers, and songwriters. Her music has been performed at soundSCAPE, the Fontainebleau Summer Sessions, the Loretto Project, the Atlantic Music Festival, and the Center for New Music. Cashetta has worked with ensembles and soloists including the Eco Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, Soo Yeon Lyuh, Matt Ingalls, and Longleash. She is currently a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, where she is studying with Ken Ueno, Franck Bedrossian, Cindy Cox, Myra Melford, and Edmund Campion.
Emma O’Halloran is an Irish composer, producer, and performer whose work moves freely between acoustic and electronic forces. She has written for orchestra, folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, and laptop orchestra. Her work has been performed at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and MATA Festival, and she has collaborated with artists such as Crash Ensemble, PRISM Quartet, and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. In addition to concert music, she composes for film and theater, besides performing with her band, Games Violet, a producer-performer duo that makes hybrid rock/electronic music. O’Halloran considers much of her music to be reflective, and often tries to map real or imagined moments in time to gain a
X. Lee, based in Los Angeles, defines their voice by the integration of interaction, electronics, multimedia visuals, gesture/movement performance, spatial design, and the synthesis of acoustic and electronic elements. Their renowned background as a DJ and producer in the techno subculture, juxtaposed with their extensive education and training in classical composition, theory and practice, has given them a unique understanding of the relationship between music, technologies, and the human experience. The fully immersive energy and large-scaled audio-visual interactions of “raves” inspires them to take the abstract concepts and aesthetics of techno into their personal electro-acoustic works. They have participated in summer festivals such as the Conservatoire Americaine de Fontainebleau – under the mentorship of François Paris, Martin Matalon, and Allain Gaussin – and Contemporary Music Creation + Critique at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), which ran alongside ManiFESTE. Their audio-visual electronic works have won calls for scores both from Ensemble Mise-En for Bushwick Open Studios and from Listening to Ladies for Ensemble Ctrl-Z. Most recently, they were featured on the Eastman School of Music’s radio show featuring trans and gender non-binary contemporary composers. In fall 2018, X. Lee will continue their studies in the Cursus Program at IRCAM.
Competition Judges & Mentors
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” (WQXR/Q2) and “mesmerizing and affecting” (Feast of Music) while The New York Times noted her “capacity to surprise” and her “quirky approach to scoring”. Her music has been performed at the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Ecstatic Music Festival and the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial and she has collaborated with artists like Sō Percussion, loadbang, American Composers Orchestra and Face the Music, among others. Angélica is currently a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center (CUNY), where she studies composition with Tania León. She’s a teaching artist for New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Lincoln Center Education working with learners of all ages on creative composition projects. Angélica was the 2014-2015 Van Lier Fellow at American Composers Orchestra and was recently selected as one of the recipients for NYFA’s 2016 Artists’ Fellowship Program.
Paola Prestini’s music has been commissioned by and performed at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, BAM, and Barbican Centre, by Brooklyn Rider, LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and others. Her current commissions include a new opera with Robert Wilson and a new opera with Minnesota Opera. She is the founding Artistic Director and co-founder of National Sawdust.
Born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in NYC, Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and performance artist and Pulitzer Prize winning Composer.. Her music exists at an artistic crossroads of orchestral, chamber music, theatre, opera, orchestral, cabaret, storytelling, pop music, visual arts and noise. Hailed by The New York Times as a leading figure in China’s new generation of composers, Du Yun’s music is championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras and organizations. Selected commissions include the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Mann Center for the Performing Arts, American Composers Orchestra, Berkeley Symphony, Whitney Museum of American Art, Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer/ Commissioning USA, Chamber Music America, and Shanghai Electronic Music Week.
