After helping review 159 submissions from 18 countries, the judging panel of the Barlow Endowment awarded Stacy Garrop of Chicago, Illinois,
the $12,000 Barlow Prize to compose a major new work for Akropolis and the reed quintet! Our bassoonist, Ryan Reynolds, traveled to Salt Lake City, Utah to sit on the judging panel, and we are beyond excited to begin working with Stacy to create this cornerstone work.
Dr. Garrop is a graduate of Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. Currently Music Alive’s composer-in-residence with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra and previous faculty member at the Chicago College of Performing Arts, Dr. Garrop has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, Utah Arts Festival, the Detroit Symphony, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and many others. She has also attended residencies at the Aspen Music Festival, Banff Center for the Arts, McDowell Colony, Millay Colony, Oxford Summer Institute, Round Top Festival, Ucross Foundation, Wellesley Composers Conference and Yaddo. In addition her music has been performed by the Albany Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Gaudete Brass Quintet, San Francisco Choral Society, Volti, and many others.
The Barlow Endowment was established in 1983. Since then it has awarded $1.8M in prizes and commissions to more than 275 composers across the world. It has commissioned new works from Gyorgi Ligeti, Christopher Rouse, Henryk Gorecki, John Corigliano, Chen Yi, Augusta Read Thomas, Dai Fujikura, William Bolcolm, and Mario Davidovsky, to name only a few. Performers and ensembles who have premiered these works include Yo-Yo Ma, Dawn Upshaw, Ransom Wilson, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, the King’s Singers, Empire Brass, Nexus, Boston Musica Via, eighth blackbird, the Muir Quartet, the United States Marine Band, the Dale Warland Singers, and the BBC Singers among many others.
Stacy Garrop's work will be premiered in 2019 by a consortium of three quintets: Akropolis (Michigan), BYU (Utah) and Calefax (Netherlands).
This is a huge honor and testament to the growing popularity of the reed quintet over the past decade. We'd like to thank the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition for realizing the immense compositional potential of this ensemble, and we are thrilled to be judging this competition alongside our mentors & the very ensemble that created the reed quintet over 30 years ago, Calefax.