Hot off the…ur presses. Australian Brett Dean has won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing (2006; if you have RealPlayer installed you can hear a couple minutes of it here, as well as a podcast interview with Dean himself). The Grawemeyer Award, granted annually by the University of Louisville, is the world’s most prestigious composition prize—worth $200,000—and Dean is the first composer from Oz to win the award. Dean’s The Lost Art of Letter Writing was selected from a field of 145 entries worldwide, and the Grawemeyer’s prize announcement describes the concerto as “a wonderful solo vehicle that also contains terrific writing for orchestra.”
“The writing of music is a solitary process, and one spends a lot of time immersed in one’s own internal sound world,” says Dean. “A prize is an acknowledgement that one’s work is not only being heard, but appreciated in the big, wide world outside of one’s own studio. But I can think of no prize which represents a more significant acknowledgement of this kind than the Grawemeyer Award. To read the names of the award’s previous winners, and to know that my own work will stand alongside the work of these legendary musicians that I admire so greatly, is a humbling and moving experience.”
We’re not the kind of folks to say “we told you so” but our founding publisher Duane Harper Grant spotted Dean as a comer way back in 2000 and did an interview with him for Sequenza21. Here’s what we wrote at the time in the introduction: “Unless you follow the Berlin Philharmonic or the Australian classical music scene or have stumbled into the late night underground experimental music scene in Berlin or onto one of his very hard to find recordings, you may never heard of Brett Dean (b. 1961). But, you will. You will.” The interview is here.
About The Lost Art of Letter Writing:
19th century letters,
21st century composition
The Lost Art of Letter Writing was commissioned by the Cologne Philharmonie and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra for violinist Frank Peter Zimmermann. Dean conducted the premiere in 2007 at the Philharmonie in Cologne with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Zimmermann has played the concerto twelve times to date, including performances in Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Stockholm and Boston.
Conductor Markus Stenz led Zimmerman and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the U.S. premiere performances November 1-3, 2007 at Symphony Hall.
Each movement in the half-hour concerto begins with an excerpt from a 19th-century letter, with a violin evoking the mood of each letter as it plays the alternate roles of writer and recipient. Authors of the letters include composers Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, artist Vincent Van Gogh and Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.
About Brett Dean:
Brett Dean (b.1961) studied in Brisbane until 1984, when he moved to Germany to join the Berlin Philharmonic’s viola section, a position he held for 15 years. He began composing in 1988, becoming established in his own right through works such as the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music which won a UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers award, the piano quintet Voices of Angels, and Twelve Angry Men written for the 12 cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic. Leaving the orchestra to devote himself to full-time composition, he returned to Australia in 2000. He continues to perform as a violist and conductor and is artistic director of the Australian National Academy of Music.
Dean’s most widely-known work, Carlo for strings, sampler and tape, was inspired by the music of Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo. Other major scores include Beggars and Angels (1999), commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra; Pastoral Symphony (2001), written for Ensemble Modern, and Testament (2003), composed for the Berlin Philharmonic’s twelve violas. Dean has performed his Viola Concerto (2004) 17 times on four continents since its premiere and the work was recently released on an all-Dean disc on the BIS label. He is currently composing his first opera, Bliss, with a libretto by Amanda Holden based on the novel by Peter Carey. Two recent works related to the opera are Moments of Bliss, selected as Best Composition Award at the 2005 Australian Classical Music Awards, and Songs of Joy, premiered by Sir Simon Rattle in Liverpool in October.
Chicago is the next American city to hear Brett Dean’s music: Cliff Colnot will lead members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in the U.S. premiere of Recollections on January 12, 2009. David Robertson will lead the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in two performances of Carlo on March 21-22, 2009 at Powell Symphony Hall.
Dean’s music, including The Lost Art of Letter Writing, is exclusively published by Boosey & Hawkes.
About the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition:
Often described as “the Nobel Prize for Classical Music,” the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition was established in 1984 and previous winners have included Witold Lutoslawski, György Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, John Adams, Unsuk Chin and György Kurtág. The Grawemeyer Foundation at the University of Louisville awards one million dollars each year, $200,000 each for music composition, education, ideas improving world order, religion and psychology. The selection process includes a jury of professionals from each discipline and a knowledgeable lay panel. The late Charles Grawemeyer was an industrialist, entrepreneur and University of Louisville graduate who had a lifelong passion for music, education and religious studies. For further information about the Grawemeyer Awards visit www.grawemeyer.org.
oops … Haydn …
While I guess I have, in fact, heard of the Grawemeyer Music Prize referred to as the “Nobel Prize” in music, I have never personally considered it as such.
Originally, the Nobel Prizes were intended, by Alfred Nobel’s will, to go “to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind.” [The original awards, in 1901, were expanded, in 1969, to include economics.]
Perhaps under such a criterion only such supreme musical artists as Josquin, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms would have been worthy, conceivably, of being nominated for, and receiving, a “Nobel Prize in music”.
(Unfortunately, I still haven’t heard the Brett Dean concerto, nor some of the other violin concertos honored by the Grawemeyer Committee.)
I listened to the opening of Brett Dean’s Lost Art of Letter Writing numerous times and honestly I failed to hear all the way through the value the jury must have heard when they chose it as the winner of the Grawemeyer Award. Granted from the start it sounds good, but at the same time nothing particularly groundbreaking. Bascially not too different from most neo-romanic violin concertos. Did anyone else hear it that way? To be specific, the long, high dramatic notes for the soloist started to bore me by the end of the two or so minute clip. The first passage seems fine, good, but then when that is finished and a the texture changes, dwindling mostly to a repetitive accompanimental figure, how does the soloist enter again? well, what do you know? again with long high notes. That’s what I found boring. That lack in contrast the soloist failed to reflect in the orchestra. It seems as if the solo violin could have done anything other than continue in the same manner as the passage before. Does anyone else hear that to be the case? I must say after hearing it a few times I began to stop being annoyed as much by it all but does that really deserve the “Nobel Prize” in music?
Five violin concertos have won Grawemeyer since 1995. Hmm.
Congratulations to Mr Dean on this well earned award. I hope to be able to hear the full concerto very soon.
And while Mr Dean may be the first composer from Oz to win the award, this autumnal period might be an appropriate time to recall New Zealand composer Barry Anderson, who died in 1987, the year that ‘Mask Of Orpheus’ was honored by the Grawemeyer Committee. Mr Anderson helped prize-winner Harrison Birtwistle (and librettist Peter Zinovieff) to realize the important computer music used in the Orphic interludes to that major twentieth century music drama (the first of three Grawemeyer recognized operatic masterpieces).
(I see that critic and music historian Richard Taruskin has little to comment on about Birtwistle in his new volumes “The Danger of Music” and “On Russian Music” despite his important insights on Messiaen, Adams, and other matters.)