Time for a jazz composer?
Last offered in 2013, the Paul Lowin Prizes are among Australia’s richest prizes for music composition
Perpetual and the Australian Music Centre have announced the 2016 Paul Lowin Prizes:
The Paul Lowin Orchestral Prize 2016 – $25,000
The Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize 2016 – $15,000
The Orchestral Prize ($25,000) is awarded for a work for modern chamber or symphony orchestra of at least 30 players and 15 independent lines. The work may include instrumental or vocal soloists and/or choral, electronically produced or pre-recorded elements. The Song Cycle Prize ($15,000) will be awarded to a work suitable for chamber performance, using no more than 1-8 independent vocal lines, accompanied by up to 10 instrumental players. At the discretion of the jury, highly commended works may receive a $400 prize.
Previous recipients of the Paul Lowin Prizes include Nigel Westlake, Elliott Gyger, Mary Finsterer, Andrew Schultz, Brett Dean, Rosalind Page, Nigel Butterley, Julian Yu, Georges Lentz, Brenton Broadstock, Martin Wesley-Smith, Raffæle Marcellino, Liza Lim and Andrew Ford.
A jazz composer has yet to win a prize, but Mark Isaacs was a finalist in the 2013 competition.
Guidelines and online nominations
Nominations for Paul Lowin Prizes are accepted from anyone, including publishers, composers and the general public. Entries can be lodged online at here. Deadline for nominations is 5pm on 30 June 2016.
History of the Paul Lowin Prizes
Paul Lowin was born in 1893 in Czechoslovakia, and lived in Austria in the 1930s before settling in Australia in 1939. He lived in Australia for two decades before returning to Vienna, where he died in 1961. Lowin’s great passion in life was music, and he left a hand-written will which indicated his wish to establish a competition for works by living Australian composers in a ‘modern but not too modern’ style. Because of the lack of clarity in the will, there ensued a thirty-year sustained effort by the executors of his estate to establish a viable competition for composers. The competition was initially held every three years in 1991-97. In 1995 further changes by the court enabled the competition to be held every 2-3 years.
