Christopher Cerrone ’14 DMA wins Rome Prize

Composition alumnus Christopher Cerrone has been named the winner of the Samuel Barber Rome Prize for 2015–2016. The awards were announced recently by the American Academy in Rome. The annual Rome Prize Fellowship supports advanced independent work in the arts and humanities in a unique residential community in Rome.

Cerrone, a composer, will use his time in Rome to compose new works inspired by Italian architecture, art, and acoustics. In 2014 Cerrone was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his opera Invisible Cities, which the Pulitzer jury called “A captivating opera based on a novel by Italo Calvino in which Marco Polo regales Kublai Khan with tales of fantastical cities, adapted into an imaginary sonic landscape.”

The Rome Prize goes to twenty-nine artists and scholars — two in the field of music — who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for a period of six months to two years in Rome. Winners are selected by independent juries of distinguished scholars and artists through a national competition process in one of the eleven disciplines supported by the Academy. More than 900 applications were submitted from 46 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, making this an exceptionally competitive field.