1st Prize: Simon Fink's Four Pastorals
2nd Prize: Justin Merritt's Ravenings
Honorable Mention:
Randolph Partain, Seven Oblivions
Lan-Chee Lam, Starry Night
Octavio Vazquez, String Quartet
Matthew Goodheart, String Quartet (Study #5)
Simon Fink (b. 1980) is a composer working in concert music, electronic music, and pop music. Drawing on both old and new compositional techniques, his work explores time, space, and emotion through harmonic tension and rhythmic drama. His music has recently been played by ensembles such as the Pacifica Quartet, eighth blackbird, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. Simon has won numerous honors, awards, and grants from organizations such as the New York Youth Symphony, the American Composers Forum, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. In 2009 he won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Award for his piece for string quartet and electronics, Electric Pastoral. In 2008 he was awarded fellowships to both the Aspen Music Festival and the I-Park Artists’ Enclave. He has collaborated on multimedia performance projects with the arts organizations Uniondocs and Peter Stuyvesant’s Ghost in New York and Berlin. Simon'’s pop music project, Still Lost Bird Music, released its first album in 2008 on the DashGo Records label. The single, “Chocolate Heart,†is currently featured on the popular iPhone game, Tap Tap Revenge. He holds degrees from the North Carolina School of the Arts and Rice University and is currently working under a fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to finish his dissertation piece, an original song cycle set to early twentieth-century poetry, en route to a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Chicago.
