A total of 23 composers have won more than $50,000 in the 2015 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers and SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Audio-visual Composers. Both competitions, presented annually, are open to Canadian citizens 30 years of age and under.
View complete lists of winners with their biographies:
SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers
SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Audio-visual Composers
This year’s 24th annual SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers attracted 187 entries, awarding $29,250 to 15 prizewinners, some of whom took home multiple awards. The jury chose to award the Grand Prize this year to Montreal-based composer Darren James Russo, for his ambitious 72-minute opera Storybook.
The Awards for Young Composers attracted 187 entries this year.
The SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers recognize Canadian composers for specific musical works in five categories of concert music. The submissions were judged anonymously by a jury of three prominent composers with decades of experience teaching composition in the university milieu: Dr. Keith Hamel (at the right in the photo above) of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Dr. Eric Morin of l’Université Laval in Quebec City (at the left in the photo), and Dr. John Burge of Queen’s University in Kingston, ON (centre in the photo), a SOCAN Foundation Board member.
“I feel it has pretty much everything in it,” says Eric Morin of Russo’s Storybook. “Looking at it from any perspective, it is full of imagination and inventiveness, both pleasing and fulfilling.” Keith Hamel calls it “an exquisite, sophisticated work, showing superb control and pacing at every turn.”
The John Weinzweig Grand Prize celebrates the best overall work submitted in the competition, and is valued at $3,000. Russo’s work was also recognized with the $3,000 first prize in the competition’s Godfrey Ridout Awards.
Other major winners include Matthew Ricketts, who took the $3,000 first prize in the Sir Ernest MacMillan Awards category for Flat Line, the $1,500 second prize in the Serge Garant Awards category for In Partial View, and a three-way shared third prize ($750 to each co-winner) in the Godfrey Ridout Awards for Women Well Met; Philippe Macnab-Séguin, who took the $3,000 first prize in the Serge Garant Awards category for his Percussion Sextet, and the $750 third prize in the Hugh Le Caine Awards category for Through the Cracks; Christopher Goddard, who shared second prize ($1,500 to each co-winner) in the Pierre Mercure Awards category for And Chase, and took the $750 third prize in the Sir Ernest MacMillan Awards category for Janus Turns; and Michael Lukaszuk, who took the $3,000 first prize in the Hugh Le Caine Awards for his electroacoustic work Ritus.
Ricketts’ Flat Line impressed the jury greatly, says John Burge, “by the sense of orchestral weight and control. Despite being scored for an ensemble of 15 instruments, the effect is at times that of a large orchestra. Also, it shows imaginative use of instrumental colour and rhythmic precision.”
Macnab-Séguin’s Percussion Sextet came across, in the words of Eric Morin, as “a thrilling work that keeps the listener on the edge of the seat.”
The SOCAN Foundation Young Audio-Visual Composers Awards Jury. Left to right: Pete Coulman, Mike Shields, Marc Ouellette (recently elected SOCAN Foundation President).
Finally, Lukaszuk’s Ritus conjures “a rich and evocative sound-world, demonstrating excellent control of foreground and background elements,” says Keith Hamel.
This year’s fifth annual SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Audio-visual Composers attracted 46 entries, awarding $21,000 to eight prizewinners. This is a unique competition, the only one of its kind in Canada. It offers us an excellent opportunity to spotlight the many talented composers working in Canada’s vibrant film and television industries, including this year’s first prize-winners, Andrew Creaghan, Antoine Binette Mercier, Vincent L. Pratte and Isaias Garcia.
The SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Audio-visual Composers recognize Canadian composers for four categories of music created exclusively for audio-visual support (film, TV, Internet). The competition was judged by a jury of three prominent media composers: Pete Coulman of Toronto, ON, Marc Ouellette of Montreal, QC, (recently elected SOCAN Foundation President) and Mike Shields of Calgary, AB.
The jury members praised Andrew Creaghan’s score for Lola, a short film that relates the story of a 24-year-old girl who feels all control of her life slipping away from her, which won Creaghan the $3,000 first prize in the Fiction category. Pete Coulman found it “intriguing” and remarked on the “uniqueness of the sound palette.” Marc Ouellette was impressed with the “superb overall production quality.”
Antoine Binette Mercier’s score for the documentary Le Nez, which details how scents are intimately connected to our emotions and memories, also gripped the jury. Mike Shields was “won over by its originality” and Pete Coulman remarked on the composer’s “nice choice of instruments, behind a very active voice-over.”
Other $3,000 first-prize winners were Vincent L. Pratte for his airy music in the stop-action short Blossom (Animated film category), which Mike Shields found “emotionally engaging”; and Isaias Garcia for the short film The Path (Musical Theme category), which Marc Ouellette called “a most convincing signature identity for the film.”
Pratte, who has won multiple awards in this competition over the past several years, also shared the second prize in the Fiction category with Eli Bennett ($1,500 for each composer) for his score for the film Trenches (Bennett was recognized for his contributions to the film Jobless), and Garcia was honoured with a shared third prize in the Fiction category, also for The Path, along with Maya Postepski for her work on Closet Monster (each composer wins $750). Garcia also took the $750 third prize in the Animated category for his music for the video game Dream Revenant.
The next application deadline for both competitions is April 15, 2016.