The 2021 Etchings Festival
Faculty Composers
Trevor Weston | David Rakowski
Emily Koh | Martin Brody
Composer Fellows:
Ethan Soledad, Stephany Svorinic, Grace Hughes, Joseph Harkins, Parker Callister, Carlos Mauro
Faculty Biographies
Trevor Weston’s music has been called a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” (Detroit Free Press) Weston’s honors include; the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, Berkeley, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony. Weston co-authored with Olly Wilson, “Duke Ellington as a Cultural Icon” in the Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington, published by Cambridge University Press.
Carnegie Hall co-commissioned Weston’s Flying Fish, with the American Composers Orchestra, for its 125 Commissions Project. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiered Weston’s Dig It, for the Ecstatic Music Festival in NYC in 2019. The Grammy-nominated Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street, under the direction of Julian Wachner, recorded a CD of Trevor Weston’s choral works. Weston’s work Juba for Strings won the 2019 Sonori/New Orleans Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition. Dr. Weston is currently Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
Emily Koh (b.1986) is a Singaporean composer and double bassist based in Atlanta, GA. Her music reimagines everyday experiences by sonically expounding tiny oft-forgotten details. In addition to writing acoustic and electronic concert music, she enjoys collaborating with other creatives in projects where sound plays an important role.
Described as ‘the future of composing’ (The Straits Times, Singapore), she is the recipient of awards such as the Copland House Residency Award, Young Artist Award, Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize, ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, Prix D’Ete, and PARMA competitions. Emily’s works have been described as “beautifully eerie” (New York Times), and “subtly spicy” (Baltimore Sun). This season, her work “After Igor” was chosen to be performed by the Aguascalientes Symphony Orchestra as part of the American Composers Orchestra’s first international Earshot Program.
Emily is currently Assistant Professor of Composition at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music, University of Georgia in Athens, GA.
David Rakowski has received a large number of awards and fellowships, including the Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Rome Prize, and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music (for pieces commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the US Marine Band). He has composed nine concertos, six symphonies, 100 piano études, 74 piano préludes, eight song cycles, and a large amount of wind ensemble music, chamber music, and vocal music for various combinations, as well as music for children. His music has been commissioned, recorded, and performed widely and is published by C.F. Peters. He is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition at Brandeis University, having also taught at New England Conservatory, Harvard, Columbia, and Stanford. In 2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Primarily a composer of concert and theatrical chamber music, Martin Brody has also written extensively for film and television. He has received various awards and commissions, among them the Academy-Institute Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and commissions from the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation's Regional Touring Program, the Artists Foundation, and the Massachusetts Arts and Humanities Council. In the fall of 2001, he was Fromm Composer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Brody is president of the Stefan Wolpe Society and has also served as a Director of the League of Composers-ISCM, the Composers Conference, and Boston Musica Viva. In 1987 he collaborated with the ethnomusicologist Ted Levin to initiate a US-USSR composers exchange sponsored by the International Research and Exchanges Board, the first such exchange to occur in 25 years. He has written extensively on contemporary music and serves on the editorial board of Perspectives of New Music.