2025
William Bolcom
William Bolcom (b. 1938) was born and raised in Seattle, where he began composition studies at the University of Washington at age eleven. He has been honored with the Pulitzer Prize for his Twelve New Etudes for Piano (1988), four Grammy awards for his album Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (Naxos, 2005), and the National Medal of Arts (2007). His extensive worklist of compositions for solo, chamber, and large ensembles often draws on popular music styles such as ragtime piano and cabaret songs. He has frequently performed and recorded with his wife and musical partner, mezzo-soprano Joan Morris. He joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1973.
2020
Donald Reid Womack
Donald Reid Womack (b. 1966) is a native of Virginia who has lived in Honolulu since 1994. Embracing the unique geographical position and cultural traditions of Hawaiʻi, Womack’s music blends elements of the Asia-Pacific region. A Guggenheim Fellow who is also the recipient of two Fulbright Fellowships, he has spent extensive time in East Asia learning instrumental techniques and timbres of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese music. He is in the vanguard of intercultural composition, earning a reputation as one of the leading composers of contemporary music for Korean instruments. His works have been performed and broadcast in twenty-five countries and recorded on more than a dozen releases. He serves as chair of the Music Department of the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa and received the Excellence in Research Award, the University’s highest honor, in 2024.
2024
George Shirley
A native of Indianapolis, George Shirley earned his bachelor’s degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, followed by subsequent studies in New York, Washington, and Italy. He was the winner of the 1961 Metropolitan Opera Auditions, earning a contract with his performance of Puccini’s “Nessun dorma.” The first Black tenor to receive a contract from the Met, he sang with the company for eleven seasons. Mr. Shirley has continued his commitment to educating young singers at the University of Maryland, and since 1987 at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre, & Dance, where he is the Joseph Edgar Maddy Distinguished University Emeritus Professor of Voice. In 2014, he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
2023
Gaelynn Lea
Gaelynn Lea won NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2016. Since then, she has captivated audiences around the world with her haunting original songs and traditional fiddle tunes. Gaelynn Lea has opened for Wilco, The Decemberists, LOW, and the industrial rock supergroup Pigface. Most recently, Lea composed and performed the music for Macbeth on Broadway, starring Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga. This iconic Shakespeare play was directed by Sam Gold and was nominated for three Tony Awards, including Best Sound Design. Lea is a sought-after public speaker about Disability Rights and accessibility in the arts. She has shared her perspective on PBS NewsHour, On Being with Krista Tippett, The Moth Radio Hour, NowThis, The Science of Happiness Podcast, and via two widely-viewed TEDx Talks. Lea is a co-founder of RAMPD: Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities. The mission of this fast-growing, disability-led coalition is to amplify disability culture, promote inclusion, and advocate for accessibility in the music industry. She is currently writing a memoir about her touring adventures and disability advocacy.
2022
Mariachi Cobre
Founded in Tucson in 1971, Mariachi Cobre has represented Mexican music as a featured group at Disney World’s Epcot Center since 1982, sharing mariachi music with millions of people over the last several decades. Led by Steve Carrillo, they have performed with artists such as Linda Ronstadt, Lucha Villa, Lola Beltran, Ana Gabriel, Guadalupe Pineda, Julio Iglesias, and Vikki Carr, as well as with orchestras across the US and Mexico.
2021
Carrie Brownstein
Born in Seattle, Washington, but raised in Redmond Washington, Carrie Brownstein came to prominence in the alternative, underground music scene of the Pacific Northwest during the early 1990s. While enrolled at Evergreen State College, Brownstein formed the band Excuse 17 with Becca Albee and CJ Phillips. Excuse 17 served as one of the pioneering bands associated with the riot grrl movement, an underground punk movement that is associated with the emergence of third wave feminism. Unlike conventional pop music, the music of the riot grrl movement addressed domestic violence, racism, rape, and patriarchy. It grew to be a larger global art movement that included political action grassroots organizing, zine culture, and art. In 1994, Brownstein joined Corin Tucker (former leader of the riot grrl band Heavens to Betsy) and Janet Weiss to form the band Sleater-Kinney. The group recorded seven studio albums before taking a hiatus in 2006. It was during this time that Brownstein began writing about music. In addition to writing music-related reviews of video games for Slate, she also wrote a blog for NPR Music called “Monitor Mix” from 2007 to 2010. Brownstein was the only woman listed on Rolling Stone Reader’s list of the 25 “Most Underrated Guitarists of All Time.”
2020
Philip Brunelle
Philip Brunelle is a distinguished conductor and arts leader dedicated to advancing choral music through performance, education, and advocacy. As founder and artistic director of VocalEssence, he has championed both the preservation of significant choral repertoire and the comission of new works. Brunelle has conducted the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and Minnesota Orchestra, and has led choral festivals and opera productions throughout the world. In addition to his conducting career, Brunelle has made substantial contributions to the field through publishing and editorial work. He serves as editor of two choral series for Boosey & Hawkes and chairs the review committee for Walton Music. He also serves as Organist-Choirmaster at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, where he continues his lifelong commitment to musical excellence and community engagement.
2019
Art Neville
Keyboardist and singer Art “Poppa Funk” Neville (1937–2019) was New Orleans “royalty,” playing a seminal role in the New Orleans music scene for 65 years. He was a founding member and frontman of The Meters, a founding member of the Neville Brothers, a 2018 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient for his work with the Meters, and a member of the Funky Meters. Neville made numerous R&B recordings that became classics of the era, including “Cha Dooky Do” and “All These Things.” In the mid-1960s he founded Art Neville & the Neville Sounds, which evolved into The Meters. The group is considered one of the originators of funk, and their songs “Look-Ka Py Py” and “Cissy Strut” have become classics. Neville left the band in 1977 to perform with his three brothers, Aaron, Charles, and Cyril. For over 30 years the Neville Brothers found success as ambassadors of New Orleans funk, R&B, soul, and Mardi Gras Indian music, recording the seminal album Yellow Moon and becoming the first New Orleans band to perform on the television show Austin City Limits. The Nevilles’ last album was released in 2004 and their last concert was in 2012.
2018
Chen Yi and Zhou Long
Dr. Chen Yi (violinist-composer) and Dr. Zhou Long (composer) are Chinese-American musicians and life partners whose compositions have stretched the boundaries of both Chinese and Western musical traditions. They currently serve as professors at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Conservatory of Music and Dance.
As many listeners and most critics have pointed out, Dr. Chen’s compositions are marked by a fusion of traditional Chinese elements, particularly those of Beijing Opera, and European contemporary techniques. She has received the Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she has received numerous fellowships, among them from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; and numerous honors, such as first prize from the Chinese National Composition Contest, the ASCAP Concert Music Award, and the Elise Stoeger Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Her works have been recorded on a variety of labels and published by Theodore Presser. Zhou Long is likely best known for his Pulitzer Prize–winning opera Madame White Snake, which was premiered by Opera Boston in 2010, with a libretto in English by Cerise Lim Jacobs. Zhou’s music is deeply grounded in the entire spectrum of his Chinese heritage, including folk, philosophical, and spiritual ideals. Throughout his career he has explored how to transfer the idiomatic sounds and techniques of ancient Chinese musical traditions to modern Western instruments and ensembles. In so doing, he has created a genuinely new kind of music. Other of Zhou’s honors include the Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, commissions from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, among many others.
2017
Beverley Diamond
Canadian ethnomusicologist Beverley Diamond was the first Canada Research Chair in Ethnomusicology at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where she established and directed the Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media, and Place from 2003 to 2015. Now Professor Emeritus, she is one of the leading voices in ethnomusicology in Canada and on the international scene. Previously, she held positions at McGill, Queen’s, and York Universities, as well as visiting professorships at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. Diamond is especially known for her research on indigenous music cultures, Canadian historiography, and gender issues. Diamond’s extensive publication list includes Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America (co-authored, 1994), Music and Gender (co-edited, 2000), Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008), and Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada: Echoes and Exchanges (co-edited, 2012), among other studies. Diamond is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, considered the highest academic honor in Canada (elected 2008), and is a Member of the Order of Canada (2013). She was a Trudeau Foundation Fellow (2009-12), and received the Gold Medal of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2014). Citation by John Koegel.
2016
Terri Lyne Carrington
Terri Lyne Carrington’s career as drummer, composer, producer, and media entrepreneur spans nearly forty years, having begun while a child prodigy in a jazz family in the Boston area. Her drum studies began at age 7, her first professional job as a jazz drummer came at age 10, and at age 11 she received a full scholarship to Berklee College of Music (where she holds an honorary doctorate and has recently become a professor). Though the “played-with” list of jazz giants continued through her childhood, she quickly became recognized as a first-tier session and touring drummer, especially through her work with genre-bending jazz and fusion artists including Wayne Shorter and David Sanborn, and a long association with Herbie Hancock—she was a member of all three of Hancock’s touring bands (acoustic and electric) from 1997 to 2007. In the late 1980s, she was the house drummer on the Arsenio Hall Show, while also shifting her focus to writing and producing for both her own projects and those of other artists (including Diane Reeves). Her recent work as a musician-producer has tended toward large-scale cross-genre, cross-generational collaborations. She received a 2011 Grammy for Jazz Vocal for her Mosaic Project (2011), a collaboration of women music artists. In 2013, she became the first woman to win a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental album for Money Jungle: Provocation in Blue. A local treasure, Carrington was born in Medford, MA, studied and now teaches at Berklee, and is Artistic Director of Boston’s Beantown Jazz Festival.
2015
Olly Wilson
Olly Wilson (1937–2018) was a composer, conductor, performer, and scholar who integrated African and African American musical styles into his compositions. He taught at Florida A&M University from 1960 to 1965 and then joined Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music faculty. There he created a course in African American music and established an electronic music studio – the first ever program in electronic music at a music conservatory – in addition to teaching theory and composition. In 1970, he joined the faculty at University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until 2002 while also serving as a tireless advocate for diversity in the arts. While there he received a Guggenheim grant to study music in Ghana. This inspired an orchestral piece titled Shango Memory, in celebration of the Nigerian deity, and an influential article on the ways in which the cultural memory of African ideas were reflected in music by African Americans. Wilson was a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and was the recipient of two Guggenheims as well as the Rome Prize. His many commissions and compositions included electronic, symphonic, and chamber works.
2014
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
A prolific composer in virtually all media, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s works have been performed by most of the leading American orchestras and by major ensembles abroad. Her works include five symphonies and a string of concertos commissioned and performed over the past two decades by the nation’s top orchestras. Zwilich is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Music (the first woman ever to receive this coveted award), the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Chamber Music Prize, the Arturo Toscanini Music Critics Award, the Ernst von Dohnányi Citation, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Grammy nominations, the Alfred I. Dupont Award, Miami Performing Arts Center Award, the Medaglia d’oro in the G.B. Viotti Competition, and the NPR and WNYC Gotham Award for her contributions to the musical life of New York City. Among other distinctions, Ms. Zwilich has been elected to the American Classical Music Hall of Fame, the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1995, she was named to the first Composer’s Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall, and she was designated Musical America’s Composer of the Year for 1999. Ms. Zwilich, who holds a doctorate from The Juilliard School, as well as an honorary doctorate conferred by Juilliard in 2025, currently holds the Krafft Distinguished Professorship at Florida State University.
2013
Pharoah Sanders
Born in Little Rock in 1940, Pharoah Sanders is a tenor saxophonist known worldwide not just for the significance of his early work with some of jazz’s most celebrated artists (especially John Coltrane) but for the continued relevance of his performances and compositions today. After making a name for himself on the West Coast, Sanders moved to New York in 1962, where he worked with founding members of the city’s avant-garde scene, including Ornette Coleman (who once called Sanders “probably the best tenor player in the world”), Don Cherry, and Billy Higgins. He worked and recorded with Coltrane from 1965 until the latter’s death in 1967. Recordings made in the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially those with vocalist Leon Thomas, became widely known, particularly “The Creator Has a Master Plan” from the album Karma (1969). Like many of his contemporaries, much of Sanders’s music was influenced by non-Western traditions, especially those of Morocco: 1994’s The Trance Of Seven Colors was recorded there and documented a meeting between Sanders and master Gnawa musician Maleem Mahmoud Ghania. Now a resident of Los Angeles, Sanders remains a potent force on the current jazz scene, touring internationally with his quartet.
2012
Doc Watson
Doc Watson is a national treasure, a musicianer of remarkable creativity and soul who drank deeply of our American song in forging a traditional music that was freely unfettered from tradition. Doc Watson absorbed the sounds of balladry, shape note hymnody, Carter Family gospel, and fiddle tunes and transformed them through his imagination, his voice, and his guitar into a fresh and vibrant new language that honored the past while embracing the future. Doc understood just how to make the old new. Born in the rugged mountainous country of Wautauga County, North Carolina in 1923, Arthel Lane Watson grew up with music closely tied to home and hearth. Doc and his brother Linny started playing at community gatherings in the brother duet style of the Bolicks, Monroes, and Delmores. His guitar playing evolved from a Carter Family thumb-lead style to a flatpicked style influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and the Delmores. In 1947 Doc married Rose Lee Carlton, whose father Gaither was a local fiddler from whom he learned fiddle tunes and songs. By 1953 Doc was playing electric guitar with Jack Williams and the Country Gentlemen, making the old new by picking out fiddle tunes on his Les Paul electric guitar during local dances. By now, Doc had a head full of songs, fingers full of notes, and was creatively fashioning something new and unique from his treasury of tradition. Citation by Ron Pen.
2010
R. Murray Schafer
For more than half a century, R. Murray Schafer has set us a marvelous model as a contemporary creator. A Renaissance man in our own time, he has enjoyed a productive and indeed provocative career as composer, performer, educator, writer, social critic, artist, and journalist. After directing the concert series “Ten Centuries” in the 1960s, he explored new acoustical frontiers through his World Soundscape Project, for the study of the relationships of people and their acoustic environments. His research resulted in several “natural environment” works, some of them spatially conceived, including Music for Wilderness Lake for twelve trombones, and Apocalypsis, which requires 500 performers. During the 1980s he continued the twelve-work cycle Patria, which combines music with theater—his “theater of confluence”—to explore the relationship between these arts and the transformation of the audience from spectators to participants. His other scholarly activities include the first book-length study of Ezra Pound and music, and a performing edition of Pound’s opera Le Testament, which the BBC broadcast in 1961. Dr. Schafer has received many honors and awards, including several honorary degrees, the Canadian Music Council’s first Composer of the Year Award (1977), the first Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music (1978), the Prix International Arthur-Honegger (1980), the Banff National Award in the Arts (1985), and the first Glenn Gould Award (1987). Citation by Tom Riis
2009
Tony Isaacs
Tony Isaacs co-founded Indian House Records in 1966 with Ida Lujan Isaacs in Taos, New Mexico. He began making field recordings in 1954, when he recorded Oglala Lakota singers at the Flagstaff Powwow in Arizona. Several thousand field recordings among tribes in the United States and Canada followed over the next twelve years. With over 150 titles available, Indian House has one of the largest catalogues of traditional Indian American music, all of it recorded on location outdoors and none of it mixed with other musical influences in the studio. Informative liner notes are another hallmark of Isaacs’s recordings; these may explain song form, singing style, associated dances, lyrics and the use of vocables, drumming techniques, and a song’s social significance. He has also written on the history of recording traditional American Indian music. Some of his essays may be found on the Indian House website.
2008
Riders in The Sky
Who’d have thought that when Riders In The Sky first climbed into the saddle they’d be getting back into it again and again and again, 30 years in a row now. And not yet a single saddle sore! In 1977 the “western” part of “country and western” had shriveled on the cactus. That was the year that fearless cowhands Ranger Doug, Too Slim, and Woody Paul first came riding to the rescue of a form of American music and culture that was in danger of being forgotten – the songs, stories, legends, and myths of the American West.
Their saddlebags were loaded with an impeccable sense of harmony; superior musicianship; a knack for storytelling; comic timing of the highest order; consummate professionalism; inventive and compelling songwriting; an intelligent and informed approach to their material; and the best yodeling this side of the High Sierras.
Their accomplishments would fill a whole train of Conestogas:
* Over 5500 concert appearances in all fifty American states and ten countries, from county fairs to Carnegie Hall to multiple appearances with the San Antonio Symphony Orchestra.
* Coveted membership in the Grand Ole Opry in 1982.
* Weekly television shows on TNN and CBS.
* “Woody’s Round Up” in Toy Story 2 (ask your kids or your grandkids about the importance of that! )
* “Ranger Doug’s Classic Cowboy Corral” on XM Satellite Radio.
* Grammies for the music to Toy Story 2 and Monsters Inc.
* The long-running “Riders Radio Theatre” on public radio.
* More than two dozen released recordings.
By their talent, hard work, accomplishments, dedication, compassion, and humanity are we all blessed. Citation by Dale Cockrell.
2007
Thomas Hampson
Thomas Hampson is an internationally renowned baritone and has long been an enthusiastic advocate of American music – including his popular “Song of America” tour, which took him to eleven cities in 2005–2006. Hampson was inducted into the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, is an honorary member of London’s Royal Academy of Music, and bears the titles of Kammersänger of the Vienna State Opera as well as Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des letters by the Republic of France. In 2004 he was awarded the Austrian Medal of Honor in Arts and Sciences, and in 2005 he received the Netherlands’ Edison Award for Life Achievement. He also holds honorary doctorates from Whitworth College (Spokane, Washington) and the San Francisco Conservatory. Although he has sung over 60 opera roles and has been involved in some 120 recording projects, Hampson is particularly devoted to American song. It was this passion that launched the first German television program on American song (Stephen Foster and His World), the PBS special I Hear America Singing (along with a website of the same name), and partnerships between his Hampsong Foundation and the Library of Congress to further the understanding of American song in documenting the nation’s past. Bringing to life songs from the 1700s to the present day, which range from Psalm settings and hymns, folksongs and cowboy songs, to war songs and African American spirituals, he has earned the title “Ambassador of American Song.”
2006
Muhal Richard Abrams
In a career spanning five decades, Muhal Richard Abrams – as composer, performer, teacher, administrator, and creative catalyst – is widely recognized as one of the most influential figures in contemporary composition and improvised music. Born Richard Abrahams in Chicago on 19 September 1930, he attended Chicago Musical College but was largely self-taught as a musician. In 1950 he took an important early step in his professional career by writing arrangements for the Chicago-based swing pianist and bandleader Walter “King” Fleming. In 1955 Abrams co-founded, and composed and arranged for, the post-bop quartet MJT +3. Building on a foundation of swing, modern jazz, and an ongoing interest in a wide range of compositional and improvisational styles, in 1965 Abrams became co-founder and guiding force of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (or AACM). Since then Abrams has exerted a gentle but firm influence over the personal and professional development of several generations of composer-improvisers, including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, and many others. Devoted to these ideals for 40 years, the AACM has made a profound impact far beyond its modest South-Side Chicago roots, and now sponsors at least 11 distinct musical groups and several dozen individual members. While maintaining an international concert career, Abrams has produced more than two dozen recordings of his own work and has supported work by other creative musicians. His work has been commissioned by a remarkably wide range of organizations, from the Brooklyn Philharmonic, to the Center for Black Music Research, Bang on a Can, and Newband, the ensemble of instruments developed by Harry Partch. Abrams has taught composition and improvisation privately and at several institutions, including the Banff Center in Canada, Columbia University, Syracuse University, and the California Institute of the Arts. In 1990 Mr. Abrams became the first recipient of the prestigious international award the JazzPar Prize, presented by the Danish Jazz Center in Copenhagen. Citation by Jeff Magee.
2005
Pauline Oliveros
Since 1961, when she became co-director of the San Francisco Tape Center, Pauline Oliveros has been at the forefront of new music in the U.S. and the world, blurring the lines between music and theater, music and ritual, composer and listener. With a teaching and composition career that spans over five decades, Pauline Oliveros continues to break new ground, challenging us as performers, composers, and yes, scholars, to rethink our relationships not only with music but with sound itself. In her writings, Oliveros challenged preconceived notions about musical life. Her 1970 New York Times article, “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers,” was one of the first to identify the gender-biased practices of classical music that either ignored women’s contributions or dismissed them. This essay, however, is also a plea for the cause of new music and new arts. After joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, in 1967, she spearheaded festivals that brought together artists and performers across disciplines. Throughout her long and distinguished career she has created free improvisatory compositions, large-scale musical theater works, dance compositions, performance art pieces, and films with a veritable who’s who of interdisciplinary collaborators. Although her compositions “Bye, Bye Butterfly” and “I of IV” were central to the emerging field of electronic music, in recent decades Oliveros has explored meditational music, the resonance of acoustic spaces, musico-theatrical rituals, and the practice of “Deep Listening,” a term she coined in 1988. For the past decade, she has led Deep Listening Workshops, which combine movement study, meditation, improvisation, and other means to foster creativity and receptivity in a world that all too often appears to have forgotten how to listen. Citation by Susan Cook.
2004
Chris Strachwitz
2003
Mike Seeger
2002
Loretta Lynn
2001
Hollis Urban Liverpool
2000
Oscar Peterson
Georgia Sea Island Singers
1999
Van Cliburn
1998
Libby Larsen
1997
Gerard Schwarz
1996
Leonard Slatkin
1995
Gunther Schuller
1994
Max Roach
1993
Lou Harrison
1992
John Cage
1991
Frederick Fennell
1989
Bill Monroe
1988
Carleton Sprague Smith
1987
H. Earle Johnson
1986
Vera Brodsky Lawrence
1985
Gilbert Chase
1984
Irving Lowens
1983
Otto E. Albrecht
1982
Wilfrid Mellers
Virgil Thomson
1981
Howard Hanson
1980
Lester S. Levy
1979