Aaron Jay Kernis receives A.I. duPont Composer's Award
Faculty composer Aaron Jay Kernis has recently received the 2014 A.I. duPont Composer's Award from the Delaware Symphony Orchestra. He has also been selected for induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.
The duPont Composer's Award from the Delaware Symphony Orchestra recognizes a living American composer or conductor who has contributed significantly to contemporary classical music. Kernis, a Philadelphia native and 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner, will accept the prize at the DSO's final chamber concert on April 1. The program will feature music by Kernis's Musica Celestis alongside selections by Webern and Mendelssohn.
Kernis' induction into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame succeeds his induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The American Classical Music Hall of Fame, located in Cincinnati, Ohio, seeks to build and sustain enthusiasm for classical music in contemporary America by celebrating diverse facts of classical music excellence.
This coming September, a biography and wide-ranging introduction to Kernis' work written by author and musicologist Leta Miller will be published by the Illinois University Press as a part of their American Composers series.
About Aaron Jay Kernis
Among the most esteemed musical figures of his generation, Grawemeyer- and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis has been on the faculty at the Yale School of Music since 2003. He has been commissioned by sopranos Renee Fleming and Dawn Upshaw, violinists Joshua Bell and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, guitarist Sharon Isbin, and institutions including the New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, BBC Proms, Los Angeles, Walt Disney Company, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and Rose Center for Earth and Space at the Museum of Natural History. Upcoming are works for the New York Philharmonic and a consortium of “Top 10” college wind ensembles, the Seattle Symphony, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Recent recordings include song cycles by soprano Susan Narucki (Koch), and orchestral works by the Grant Park Festival Orchestra (Cedille). He has received the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Stoeger Prize, Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple Grammy nominations, and was Composer-in-Residence for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Minnesota Public Radio, and American Composers Forum. He is New Music Advisor for the Minnesota Orchestra and chairman and co-director of its Composer Institute.
