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.

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.

Com­poser Richard Zarou recently did a pod­cast inter­view with me, for his blog, No Extra Notes. No Extra Notes is a weekly pod­cast about up-and-coming com­posers. The inter­view deals with why I write music, some of the inspi­ra­tions behind my work, and a range of other top­ics. It also fea­tures two recent pieces of mine, Sen­sa­tional Rev­o­lu­tion in Med­i­cine and Kiss Around the World.