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Mark Kilstofte Receives Copland House Award


Last updated November 29, 2016

By Tina Underwood

Furman University Music Professor Mark Kilstofte has received a 2016 Copland House Residency Award. The award was granted to nine gifted American composers from nine states, and marks Kilstofte’s fourth time to be honored by Copland House.

The Copland House prize consists of an all-expense-paid stay at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley. The honor provides composers the opportunity to focus on their creative work in the same inspiring environment enjoyed by Copland himself for the last 30 years of his life.

The honorees were selected out of nearly 100 applicants from 25 states by a jury including composers Pierre Jalbert (a two-time Copland House Resident), Carman Moore, and Robert Sirota (Former-President of the Manhattan School of Music).

Mark Kilstofte World Premiere

Kilstofte’s song cycle, “The White Album,”
will be premiered by Musiqa Houston
January 7, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.
The Hobby Center for Performing Arts
800 Bagby Street
Houston, TX 77002

Learn more.

On an individual basis, the Residents will live and work for three to eight weeks in the prairie-style, hilltop house near New York City that Copland called “my hideaway, my solitude,” and was his home from 1960 to 1990.

In addition to three previous Copland House Residency Awards, Kilstofte’s honors include the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Prize, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music has been featured on NPR’s “Performance Today” and “From the Top” and performed by the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, New York Virtuoso Singers, New Amsterdam Singers, and Dale Warland Singers.

His song cycle, The White Album (commissioned by the Fromm Foundation and developed during a previous Copland House Residency), will be premiered by Musiqa (Houston) this January.

As a Copland House Resident, Kilstofte will become eligible for post-residency awards, commissions, and various performance and recording opportunities from the Music from Copland House ensemble. Possibilities include the Sylvia Goldstein Award, Borromeo String Quartet Award, Hoff-Barthelson Music School Commission, and others.

He is a graduate of St. Olaf College and the University of Michigan where he was a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow. A resident of Greenville, Kilstofte teaches music composition and theory at Furman, and is guest researcher at the University of Oslo’s Center for Ibsen Studies, where he is writing an opera based on Ibsen’s Brand.

An Official Project of the federal Save America’s Treasures program, Copland House is the only composer’s home in the United States devoted to nurturing and renewing America’s rich musical heritage through a broad range of public, educational, musical, and electronic-media activities that embrace the entire creative process. Additional information about Copland House can be found at www.coplandhouse.org.

For more information, contact the Furman News and Media Relations office at (864) 294-3107.

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