Top Young Composers Coming to Steinmetz

by Geri Throne

After a two-year hiatus due to Covid, the National Young Composers Challenge will return April 10 to Orlando. The Composium – part concert, part competition, part seminar – will be largest in the NYCC’s 17-year history. It will be held in the new Steinmetz Concert Hall at Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Admission is free. Winning compositions will be rehearsed, discussed and recorded before the live audience. The NYCC receives submissions from throughout the United States for the event. A panel of judges selects the top three orchestral and top three ensemble compositions to be performed. Because of the Covid hiatus, twice as many composers as in past years will be featured.

The national event is billed as a chance for audience members to connect to the orchestra and view the inner workings of orchestral composition. Christopher Wilkins again will serve as maestro and audience guide. The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, expanded this year with 11 more string players, will perform the works. It also will perform winning compositions from the 2021 national challenge and from the previous two years.

Founded in 2005, the NYCC is a non-profit charitable organization whose goal is to promote the creation of new orchestral music and foster the careers of the next generation of American composers.

The Composium begins at noon and continues through 6 p.m., followed by a reception. Attendees can come and go during the day, but they are encouraged to register online in advance at www.drphillipscenter.org.

 

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    By: Anne Mooney

    Anne Mooney has assumed the editorship of the Winter Park Voice from founding editor Tom Childers.

    Mooney got her start in New York as a freelance line editor for book publishers, among them Simon & Schuster and the Clarkson Potter division of Crown Books. From New York, she and her husband and their year-old toddler moved to Washington, D.C., where the two ran a newswire service for Harper’s magazine. “We called it Network News,” said Mooney, “because it was a network of the Harper’s writers, whose work we edited into newspaper style and format and sold to papers in the top U.S. and Canadian markets. We were sort of like a tiny UPI.”

    The newswire ceased operation with the death of Mooney’s first husband, but Mooney continued to write and edit, doing freelance work for Williams Sonoma cookbooks and for local publications in D.C.

    In 2005, Mooney moved to Winter Park, where she worked as a personal chef and wrote a regular food column for a south Florida magazine. She took an active interest in Winter Park politics and was there when the Winter Park Voice was founded. She wrote occasional pieces for the Voice, including the Childers bio that this piece replaces.

    The Winter Park Voice is one of a large number of “hyper-local” publications that have sprung up across the U.S. in response to the decline of the major daily newspapers and the resulting deficit of local news coverage. The Voice’sbeat is Winter Park City Hall, and its purpose is to help the residents of our city better understand the political forces that shape our daily lives.

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