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.