Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Grawemeyer to van der Aa

Michel van der Aa wins the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition, for his Up-Close, which evidently hasn't been played in the US yet. Has it been recorded?

WQXR's Q2 branch sends a weekly newletter, and this week they say that van der Aa is the second consecutive Dutch composer to win this prize. Oh, people, please copy-edit and fact-check these statements a little more carefully. Here are the last three winners:

2013 - Michel van der Aa
2012 - Esa-Pekka Salonen
2011 - Louis Andriessen

I know why this happened; the Grawemeyer web page lists winners from 2011 backwards and apparently hasn't updated to include Salonen's prize. But that means Q2 didn't notice the gap from 2011 to 2013.

Update: Fixed typo in the 2011 winner's name; h/t Zwölftöner for catching the error. See the comments for other interesting remarks. Also, Q2's story has been corrected on line.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As you highlighted yesterday for Tanglewood, where are women?

Lisa Hirsch said...

Excellent question. I think Saariaho's win, for L'amour de Loin, was the last by a woman.

Zwölftöner said...

On the subject of correctitude, it's 'Andriessen'!

Nice Tanglewood post btw.

Eric G said...

It has been recorded. van der Aa started his own label called Disquiet, and a performance is available on DVD commercially.