María del Pilar Miralles Castillo – the winner of the Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020
The final of the Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020 – a competition for female composers who create music for male choirs – took place digitally today. The first prize has been awarded to the Spanish composer María del Pilar Miralles Castillo for her piece Another day. The piece is expressive and challenging, with a dramatic music that is rarely found in traditional choral music.
The digital final of the Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020 has now been held. The competition aims to draw attention to and inspire female composers who compose music for male choirs. The competition stimulated broad interest, with as many as twenty-six competitors from fourteen countries in four continents. María del Pilar Miralles Castillo from Spain won the first prize and SEK 50,000 with the following motivation from the jury:
The first prize has been awarded to María del Pilar Miralles Castillo for her piece Another day, which is an expressive, challenging piece that is fruitful for the chorister’s development. Its dramatic music has an expression that is rarely found in traditional choral music. The dynamics, the magnificent and powerful chords, and the suggestive canon-like passages will make this piece appreciated by singers and listeners alike. We congratulate the winners and thank them for their contribution to the choral culture.
María herself describes how the piece contains both dark and light chords, and static and dynamic parts, which reflects the contrasts of the present – the reality we face, in parallel with people’s comfortable everyday lives. She is very happy and honored that her work has now been rewarded as the winner of the competition.
– First and foremost, I would like to thank all the organization of this competition and the entire choir for this opportunity. As a student, it is really difficult to get a work performed and today I just got so impressed by the outstanding level of this choir and the way they understood my piece and coped with it despite it is a very challenging work, says María del Pilar Miralles Castillo. The most important step of a compositional process is the communication act between the composers, the performers and finally the public: that is the moment when it is possible to trigger a true emotional reaction. Our task as contemporary composers nowadays is to interpret reality through music and, hopefully, to spring up that emotional response that could enhance societies.
In second place came Ingunn Ligaarden from Sweden with her piece Hope is the thing, while third prize was awarded to Linnea Landström, also from Sverige, with the piece Heart, we will forget him.
About the Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020
The Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020 is the second edition of the competition for female composers writing music for the male voice choir. The first edition took place in 2016. The competition was announced at the end of 2019 and the three finalists were announced on the International Women's Day, 8 March 2020. The original plan was to announce the winner at a concert before the summer, but the current pandemic caused it to be postponed and announced at a digital event on 28 November. The winner receives a prize of SEK 50,000.
The jury consists of Hans Lundgren, director musices emeritus and former conductor of Linköpings Studentsångare, Christina Hörnell, conductor of Linköpings Studentsångare and director musices at Linköping University, Karin Arwén Oldgren, choir conductor and head of music activities in Engelbrekt parish, Stockholm, Bo Ejeby, music editor specialised in choral music at Bo Ejeby Förlag, and Ulrika Emanuelsson, composer and conductor of the Carolinae women’s choir. The Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020 has been made possible through a generous donation from the Märta Christina and Magnus Vahlquist Foundation.
Stream the final and learn more about the Linköpings Studentsångare Composition Award 2020: https://www.lkss.se/composition-award
For more information, please contact:
Christina Hörnell, director musices, conductor of Linköpings Studentsångare
Christina.hornell@liu.se
(+46) 70 089 6922
Hans Lundgren, director musices emeritus and former conductor of Linköpings Studentsångare
hans@hanslundgren.se
(+46) 73 154 3978
Linköpings Studentsångare curate and evolve the traditions of Nordic male voice choir music, and work actively to include music written by both male and female composers. The repertoire is large and broad, including classic male voice choir music and contemporary works, and the choir is often collaborating with other choirs both male, mixed and female. Linköpings Studentsångare were founded in 1972 by the name Lihkören. The choir act as ambassadors for Linköping University through concerts and tours both in Sweden and abroad.
