2011 ASCAP Concert Music Awards Celebrated
The 12th annual ASCAP Concert Music Awards took place on May 24, 2011 at Merkin Concert Hall in New York City. Composer, conductor and radio host Bill McGlaughlin served as the host for the invitation-only event which recognized the achievements of ASCAP’s 2011 Concert Music Honorees and showcased the winners of the 2011 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards.
The 2011 honorees are:
- Zhou Long, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Music
- George Manahan, Music Director of New York City Opera and the American Composers Orchestra
- Le Poisson Rouge – David Handler and Justin Kantor, Co-Founders
- Music Publishers Association – Lauren Keiser, President
- Face The Music – Jennifer Undercofler, Founder, Artistic Director, and ConductorAt the reception following the awards ceremony, we finally had a chance to get a word from Zhou Long about winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize.
Lauren Keiser, President of the Music Publishers Association, recreated his impassioned acceptance speech for us in which he described how freedom of speech and copyright protection are fundamentally related and how both were conceived as two sides of a unified whole by the framers of the United States Constitution. Among the 30 winners and 19 honorable mentions in the 2011 ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, Anthony Cheung was awarded the Leo Kaplan Award, which is accompanied by an additional cash prize, for his composition, vis-à-vis for 18 musicians with electronics. Cheung spoke briefly about his award-winning work. Finally, eleven-year-old composer/pianist Anna Larsen was awarded the Charlotte V. Bergen Award, a special scholarship for composers under the age of 18, for her Symphony No. 1. We had an opportunity to speak with her and her father Jim Larsen about some of her recent and upcoming compositional activities —FJO