Gotham Chamber Opera and Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation award Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music to David Hertzberg

Gotham Chamber Opera and the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation are proud to announce that David Hertzberg will be the inaugural winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music, a competitive prize awarded to a composer to support the creation of a new concert work for voice and chamber ensemble. For more information on the award and its requirements, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org/registration. The Prize Jury found Mr. Hertzberg’s music to offer “an extraordinarily beautiful sound world with a unique and distinguishing vocabulary,” containing “deeply affecting emotional content,” and felt that Mr. Hertzberg has the potential to contribute a new work of substance to the concert repertoire for voice.

The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music is a new award of $15,000 to a composer for the creation of a new concert work for solo voice and chamber ensemble of between 3 and 10 acoustic instruments and between 15 and 30 minutes in length. Given the inherent challenges of writing idiomatically for the human voice, a goal of the competition is to successfully enlarge the repertoire of concert works for voice and instruments. Mr. Hertzberg’s completed work will be premiered in a concert presented under the aegis of Gotham Chamber Opera. Additional funding for the premiere is generously provided by the Hegardt Foundation.

David Hertzberg was born in 1990 and holds Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Samuel Adler. He is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma at The Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Jennifer Higdon, and has also studied at the the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Aspen Music Festival, where he studied with George Tsontakis. He was also a fellow at the European American Musical Alliance in Paris and The Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, where he studied with Anders Hillborg and Steven Stucky. In the summer of 2013 he completed a residency at Yaddo and was an inaugural participant in the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s Young Composer Program. In the summer of 2014 he will be a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center. In 2011, David received the Arthur Friedman Prize from The Juilliard School for composing the score deemed most outstanding in their annual competition for orchestral works. Shortly afterwards, he received the 2011 William Schuman Prize from BMI, another prize awarded to the most distinguished submission in their annual composer awards. In 2012, he was awarded a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, an Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, and a Jerome Fund Commission from the American Composers Forum. He was also named Composer-In-Residence for Young Concert Artists, a post which he will hold through 2014.