Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES • SPRING 2017 • sai-national.org 14 I J K O P T U X Y Z On April 10, composer and performance artist Du Yun was named the recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her operatic composition, Angel's Bone. She is the seventh woman to be so honored in the 100 years of the awards. She comprised a field of three female finalists, along with Ashley Fure and Kate Soper. With a libretto by Royce Vavrek, Angel's Bone is an allegory on human trafficking about two fallen angels found by a husband and wife who seek to exploit them for wealth. It merges chamber music, theatre, pop music, opera, cabaret, visual arts, and noise, forming a harmonious and moving piece. It was premiered on Jan. 6, 2016 at the Prototype Festival, 3LD Arts and Technology Center in New York City. Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, currently based in New York, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, working at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, and noise. She is championed by some of today's finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras, and organizations. She was named by National Public Radio as one of 100 composers under 40. Her ongoing collaborations of installation- performance-video with the Pakistani visual artist Shahzia Sikander have been on view at the Guggenheim Bilbao and in London, New Zealand, Turkey, and Tokyo. She wrote the original music for David Henry Hwang's Kung Fu, Chiori Miyagawa's Hiroshima Mon Amour, and Stan Lai's Writing on the Water. Fellow finalist Ashley Fure was nominated for her work, Bound to the Bow, inspired by Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Bound to the Bow was commissioned for the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial and premiered by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra at David Geffen Hall on June 5, 2016. Fure is an American composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music, as well as multimedia installation art. She holds a Doctorate in Music Composition from Harvard University and further degrees from IRCAM (Cursus 1 and 2), Oberlin Conservatory, and the Interlochen Arts Academy. Fure was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University in 2014 and joined the Dartmouth College Department of Music as an Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts in September 2015. She has received a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a 2015 Siemens Foundation Commission Grant, a 2014 Kranichsteiner Composition Prize from Darmstadt, a 2014 Busoni Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship to France, a 2013 Impuls International Composition Prize, a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis, a 2012 Staubach Honorarium, a 2011 Jezek Prize, and a 2011 10-month residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her kinetic installation Tripwire, created with visual artist Jean-Michel Albert, premiered at the 2012 Agora Festival in Paris and has since toured to Belgium, Montreal, Paris, and Strasbourg. Finalist Kate Soper's nominated work, Ipsa Dixit, is a chamber music theatre work for voice, flute, violin, and percussion exploring the intersections of language and music, emotion and meaning, expressivity and truth. Soper is a composer, performer, and writer currently at work on a new opera with an original libretto based on the medieval French poem "The Romance of the Rose." She is a co-director and performing member of Wet Ink, a New York-based new music ensemble dedicated to seeking out adventurous music across aesthetic boundaries, and is the Iva Dee Hiatt Assistant Professor of Music at Smith College. Soper has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, and ASCAP. She has been commissioned by ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Tanglewood Music Center/BUTI, the MIVOS string quartet, and Yarn/Wire. She performs frequently as a new music soprano with experience in Western Classical and Indian Carnatic music, songwriting, improvisation, and experimental theatre. She performs regularly in her own works, and has been featured as a composer/vocalist on the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's MusicNOW series, the New York City-based MATA and SONiC festivals, the Lucerne Forum for New Music, Gaudeamus Muziekweek New York, the Sacramento Festival of New Music, and the American Composers Orchestra's Orchestra Underground series. — pulitzer.org PULITZER PRIZES Du Yun Wins Pulitzer for Music Pulitzer recipient Du Yun, finalist Ashley Fure, left, and finalist Kate Soper, bottom. WOMEN WHO HAVE WON PULITZER PRIZE FOR MUSIC 1983 Ellen T. Zwilich (Beta Alpha initiate) for Three Movements for Orchestra 1991 Shulamit Ran (SAI Composer Bureau member) for Symphony 1999 Melinda Wagner for Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion 2010 Jennifer Higdon (SAI Honorary Member) for Violin Concerto 2013 Caroline Shaw for Partita for 8 Voices 2015 Julia Wolfe for Anthracite Fields 2017 Du Yun for Angel's Bone

• Cover