Professor Emeritus Virko Baley is the winner of Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music, 2024, in the professional division, for "Music for Emily Dickinson". Baley was selected from applications reviewed throughout the United States.
Among the many contests of The American Prize, the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music is unique. It recognizes and rewards the best performances of American music by ensembles and individual artists worldwide, based on submitted recordings. Applications are accepted from professional, college/university, community and high school age solo artists, chamber ensembles or conducted ensembles, competing in separate divisions, and from composers with excellent recordings of their works. Beginning in 2017-18, categories were expanded to encompass performances of American music in practically any instrumentation or genre, with very few repertoire restrictions. Focused exclusively on works by American composers from any period and in any style, the contest not only judges performances, but in the case of new or unfamiliar works, the music itself.
Baley is a Ukrainian-American composer, pianist, conductor. He is a Jacyk Fellow at the HURI (Harvard University), Distinguished Prof. Emeritus, former Composer-in-Residence and co-director of NEON (New Encounters of Music in Nevada at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ). He received a 2007 Grammy Award as recording co-producer for TNC Recordings and the prestigious Academy Award in Music in 2008 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The citation read: A highly cultured, polyglot intellectual, brilliant pianist and a dynamic and accomplished conductor, the Ukrainian-born Virko Baley composes music which is dramatically expansive of gesture, elegant and refined of detail and profoundly lyrical. It is music which ‘sings’ with passionate urgency whether it embraces… folkloric elements from his origins or finds expression in a more universal style of modernism typical of his earlier music. It is always a singular voice and a deeply felt and acutely heard music.
Ernst Bacon (1898—1990) was one of that pioneering generation of composers who, along with Thomson, Copland, Harris, and others, found a voice for American music. Winner of a Pulitzer Scholarship (for his Symphony in D minor) and no fewer than three Guggenheim Fellowships, Ernst Bacon set out to create compositions that expressed the vitality and affirmative spirit of our country. It is fitting, and with honor, that The American Prize creates an annual award in the memory of Ernst Bacon, recognizing the finest performances of American music worldwide. To learn more about the music & legacy of Ernst Bacon, please visit the website of the Ernst Bacon Society.
The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts is the nation's most comprehensive series of contests in the performing arts. The American Prize is unique in scope and structure, designed to recognize and reward the best performing artists, directors, ensembles and composers in the United States at professional, college/university, community and high school levels, based on submitted recordings. Now in its fourteenth year, The American Prize was founded in 2010 and is awarded annually in many areas of the performing arts. Thousands of artists from all fifty states have derived benefit from their participation in the contests of The American Prize, representing literally hundreds of communities and arts organizations across the nation.
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Additional information about the competitions on the .