ASCAP awards to Wadsworth, Falletta

The Richmond-bred composer Zachary Wadsworth, now a doctoral student at Cornell University in Ithica, NY, has won an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. He will share about $45,000 in prize money with 31 other winners for 2008.

Wadsworth, who is 24, won the ASCAP-Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition for Young Composers in November 2007. In December, he won the Boston Choral Ensemble Commission Competition.

Here's my Jan. 2 Style Weekly profile of Wadsworth:

http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=16007

JoAnn Falletta, music director of the Virginia Symphony of Hampton Roads and the Buffalo Philharmonic, will receive an ASCAP Concert Music Award for her work "as [a] conductor, communicator, recording artist, audience builder, champion of American composers and distinguished musical citizen, whose career-long advocacy for American composers has made her a leading force for the music of our time."

Falletta is one of four recipients of the award. The others are composers John Corigliano and David Lang (recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music) and Joseph Jennings, music director of Chanticleer, the San Francisco-based men’s choral ensemble marking its 30th anniversary.

The awards will be presented at a ceremony on May 22 in New York.