Lansing McLoskey | Winner, 11th Annual Commission Competition
Lansing McLoskey has been described as "a major talent and a deep thinker with a great ear" by the American Composers Orchestra, "an engaging, gifted composer writing smart, compelling and fascinating music" by Gramophone Magazine, and "a distinctive voice in American music.” McLoskey spent 20+ years as an early music singer/conductor, and has a special interest in composing for voice. He has written for some of the preeminent vocal ensembles in the world, including The Crossing, Cincinnati Vocal Arts, ensemberlino vocale (Berlin), Liber unUsualis, Tapestry, NOTUS, Boston Secession, and The Hilliard Ensemble. His Qumran Psalms – a choral cycle setting lost psalms from the Dead Sea Scrolls – won The 2016 American Prize for Choral Composition.
His music has been performed in twenty countries on six continents, and he has won more than two dozen national and international awards, including two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aaron Copland House Award, the Robert Avalon International Composition Competition, the Omaha Symphony International New Music Competition, the Kenneth Davenport National Competition for Orchestral Works, the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra Composition Competition, and the Charles Ives Center Orchestral Composition Competition. He has been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, Pew Charitable Trusts, Barlow Endowment, the New Spectrum Foundation, the International Joint Wind Quintet Project, and numerous ensembles in the States and Europe.
Professor at the Frost School of Music, he has given masterclasses/presentations at more than thirty schools and festivals, and has been the Composer-in-Residence at half-a-dozen festivals. His music is released on 16 CDs on Albany Records, WergoSchallplatten, Innova, Capstone, Tantara, Beauport Classics, and published by Theodore Presser, American Composers Press, Mostly Marimba, and Subito Music. He is an avid cyclist, surfer, and skateboarder. www.lansingmcloskey.com
Mr. McLoskey’s composition, You Have a Name and a Place, will be given its New England premiere by BCE as part of its June 2023 concert. Mr. McLoskey was also chosen as BCE’s Honorable Mention in the 2009 Commission Competition.
Honorable Mention
Mary Montgomery Koppel | Honorable Mention, 11th Annual Commission Competition
With music described by the Boston Globe as "hypnotic" and "haunting and hopeful," Mary Montgomery Koppel is a sought-after composer of choral, vocal, chamber, and orchestral works. Praised for her “luxuriant choral writing” and “myriad coloristic sonorities,” she writes in a compositional language that is both richly complex and contrapuntally refined, while remaining both aurally accessible and challenging.
MMK was a founding member and the first composer-in-residence of the Lorelei Ensemble. Since Lorelei’s founding in 2007, she has contributed eight new works to the repertoire for women’s voices, spanning ten seasons and numerous concerts throughout the United States. Performers praise MMK for her understanding of the voice, utilizing the full capacity of the instrument in "idiomatic lines of surprising yet natural contour." Recent commissions include Dawn for Six Degree Singers, Stabat Mater Speciosa for the Harvard University Choir, and Horizons for Su Lian Tan and John McDonald, released on the album GRAND THEFT and other felonies (ARSIS Audio, 2013). She recent enjoyed her Boston Symphony Hall debut when the MIT Symphony Orchestra performed her piece Kaleidoscope.
MMK is also an educator, music director, and soprano. She is an Assistant Professor at Gordon College, teaching composition, instrumentation, arranging, songwriting, and music history, and also teaches music theory at Boston University. Before moving to the Boston area in 2006, she taught at Bennington College, where she founded and conducted the Bennington College Chamber Singers. Her music direction includes work at MASSMoCA and HERE in New York. She holds a D.M.A. from the Boston University School of Music, a B.A. from Middlebury College, and a Diplôme in Composition from l’Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris.