Monday, May 23, 2011

Biblical prize winner


The Richmond-born composer Zachary Wadsworth has won a King James Bible Composition Award for “Out of the South Cometh the Whirlwind,” an anthem setting verses from the Book of Job.

The work will be performed on Nov. 16 at Westminster Abbey, London, in a service celebrating the 400th anniversary of the English translation of the Bible by scholars commissioned by King James I.

Wadsworth’s anthem will be published by Novello.

The composition competition, open to composers under 30, was initiated by the King James Bible Trust and supported by the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey. Awards were presented in two categories: a work for advanced choir, won by Wadsworth; and one for non-professional choir, won by the British organist and teacher Christopher Totney.

The 28-year-old Wadsworth, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, is pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University. In 2008 he was one of the recipients of the ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers Award; in 2007 he won the ASCAP-Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition.