Nov 5, 2019, 14:55 PM
by
Percussive Arts Society
PAS is proud to announce the winner and honorable mention of the 2019 PAS Composition Contest, hosted by the Composition Committee.
The purpose of the PAS Composition Contest is to encourage and reward composers who write music for percussion instruments, and to increase the number of quality compositions written for percussion. The 2019 Composition Contest focused on Solo Marimba.
“The Percussive Arts Society annual composition contest has taken place 45 times as of 2019. Many of the winning works have gone on to become staples of the repertoire. It has been great working with the PAS Composition Committee each year to prepare for this event which helps to promote the creation of new works. We as a committee take this contest very seriously and want to see it continue well into the future.” – Nicholaus Meyers, Composition Committee Chair, PAS
2019 Winner
Arnor Chu, Until Dawn
As an aspiring musician and composer, Arnor began studying percussion in high school with a background in piano, and has been a participant of The Juilliard School's Summer Percussion Seminar, as well as classical studies at the Eastman School of Music. He performed at Carnegie Hall in wind ensemble for Distinguished Concerts International NY's
Wind Songs in 2018. Arnor studied under the tutelage of San Francisco Symphony principal percussionist Jake Nissly and Silk Road Ensemble artist Haruka Fujii in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is now pursuing a degree in percussion performance as a freshman at Boston University on a Fine Arts Performance Award scholarship. His compositions have been performed at various music educators' conferences in the country. In his free time, Arnor enjoys writing and arranging music on the side, and occasionally posts performances of his works on
YouTube.
2019 Honorable Mention
Stephen Karukas, blue-gray
Stephen Karukas is a graduate of the Interlochen Arts Academy and a student at Indiana University, where he studies music composition, percussion performance, and computer science. He has been a performance fellow at nief-norf and a student in electronic music programming at IRCAM (Paris, France). His most recent teachers are P.Q. Phan (composition) and Joseph Gramley (percussion), and he has also studied with Steve Houghton, Kevin Bobo, John Tafoya, Claude Baker, and Don Freund.
Karukas has composed music for ensembles including the Fifth House Ensemble, the Hutchens/Myers Duo, Definiens, and the percussion ensembles at California Lutheran University and Indiana University, and his work has been featured on events such as the Navy Saxophone Symposium, RED NOTE Music Festival, and the Midwest Composers Symposium, as well as recitals at numerous other institutions around the United States. His works are available from C. Alan, Tapspace (starting 2020), and Strikeclef Publications, as well as directly from his website, skarukas.com.