Noah Fowler Photo
Hannah Lash
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has bestowed awards on four Yale School of Music composers. Dan Visconti and Jay Wadley each received a $15,000 Charles Ives Fellowship, while Christopher Cerrone and Hannah Lash, along with four other composers, received Charles Ives Scholarships in the amount of $7,500. A panel of Academy members chaired by Yale School of Music composition professor Ezra Laderman awarded 15 composers a total of $165,000.
Talking about the four Yale composers who received awards, Martin Bresnick, the Charles T. Wilson Professor in the Practice of Composition at the Yale School of Music, said, “Each of their stories is quite different.” Yale, Bresnick said, played a significant role in each of their lives and careers — some perhaps more than others.
Timo Andres Photo
Jay Wadley
Wadley, whom Bresnick described as a “very naturally gifted” composer, received his master’s degree from Yale in 2007 and completed the school’s artist diploma program the following year.
Dan Visconti. Image courtesy of the artist
Bresnick worked with Visconti at the Yale Summer School of Music in Norfolk, Conn. Visconti studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music before coming to Yale, where he studied only a year before leaving to fulfill commissions.
“His advanced level,” Bresnick said, “corresponded with his success in the world.”
Christopher Cerrone. Image courtesy of Yale School of Music
Cerrone earned a master’s degree from Yale in 2009 and completed a master of musical arts degree last year, a requirement of Yale’s doctoral program in which he’s currently enrolled. Lash is pursuing an artist diploma at Yale.
Cerrone, Bresnick said, “has a particular interest in opera and theatrical music,” is also active as a conductor and is an artistic director of the New York-based contemporary music ensemble Red Light New Music.
Bresnick met Lash in spring 2009, when he taught a semester at Harvard University. Lash was working toward her doctorate, which she earned last year. Lash has been commissioned by the likes of the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, and, last year, was a winner — along with Visconti — at the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation’s composition competition.
Lash, Bresnick said, “is having an unbelievably successful year.”