I’m pleased to announce that I received another SOCAN Award this year, bringing my career total up to six. I won a prize in the vocal category for Kiss Around the World, as performed by Ensemble Resonance in November 2009.

I was also pleased to see some of my colleagues receive well-deserved recognition, including Trevor Grahl, Alexandra Fol, and Taylor Brook. Congratulations to all.

Now that the JUNO Awards are over for the year, I can announce that I was invited to be a judge for the 2010 edition of Canada’s music industry awards. As such, I ranked recordings submitted for the “Classical Composition of the Year” category, participating in two rounds of voting, first to select the five finalists, and then to choose the winner. This year, Toronto-based composer Marjan Mozetich won the award. Mozetich is the co-founder of ARRAYMUSIC and he won for his recording of Lament in the Trampled Garden by the Penderecki Quartet.

I’m please to announce that I was awarded honorable mention in this year’s Morton Gould Awards. Founded in 1979, the awards are open to composers under 30 who are American citizens, permanent residents, or foreign students in the US. This year, there were 730 entries, making the Morton Gould Awards extremely competitive.

The piece I submitted was Kiss Around the World, commissioned by New Works Calgary for Ensemble Resonance in 2009.

The press release for the awards lists the judges and other recipients. Composer Carolyn Chen, who studied at UCSD with me, was also awarded honorable mention.

I’m pleased and excited to announce that I was declared the winner of this year’s annual Young Com­posers Meet­ing in the Nether­lands, hosted by renowned Dutch ensem­ble, orkest de ereprijs. The jurors chose between 16 pieces that the invited com­posers wrote for the ensem­ble. My piece, Love in the Time of Con­nec­tiv­ity, was a col­lage of approx­i­mately a dozen other pieces, with sources rang­ing from Claude Debussy to Pizzi­cato Five. I’ll be writ­ing another piece for the ensem­ble, to be per­formed in 2010.

I’m very excited to announce that I was awarded a Lieu­tenant Gov­er­nor of Alberta Emerg­ing Artist Award this year. This is a high-profile, mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary award, given out every other year to early-career artists from Alberta in all dis­ci­plines. In the news release for the award, the jury described me as “an artist in full com­mand of his tech­nique whose com­po­si­tions are most orig­i­nal and inven­tive, very sophis­ti­cated and intel­lec­tu­ally engag­ing”. It’s very grat­i­fy­ing to be given recog­ni­tion of this kind for my work.