The Edward MacDowell Medal is an award which has been given since 1960 to one person annually who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture and the arts. It is given by MacDowell, the first artist residency program in the United States.
The award is named for composer Edward MacDowell, who, with pianist Marian MacDowell, his wife, founded the MacDowell artist residency (formerly known as The MacDowell Colony) in 1907. The residency exists to nurture the arts by offering creative individuals of the highest talent an inspiring environment in which to produce enduring works of the imagination. [1] Each year, MacDowell welcomes more than 300 [2] [3] architects, composers, filmmakers, interdisciplinary artists, theatre artists, visual artists, and writers from across the United States and around the globe [4]
Established in 1960 with the first award going to Thornton Wilder, the award is given to one artist each year, from among seven artistic disciplines, "architecture, visual art, music composition, theater, writing, filmmaking and interdisciplinary art." [5]
Composer Aaron Copland was the second recipient of the award in 1961. Copland had been a resident of the artist's residency eight times between 1925 and 1956, and served as MacDowell's president from 1962 to 1968. [6]
Painter Georgia O'Keeffe received the award in 1972. O'Keeffe, who was then 84 years old, decided not to attend, and asked art historian Lloyd Goodrich to accept the award on her behalf. Goodrich explained that O'Keeffe believed that her paintings were more important than her words. [7]
When writer Mary McCarthy won the award in 1984, The New York Times sent culture reporter Samuel G. Freedman to Peterborough to interview McCarthy and cover the ceremony. McCarthy commented that if she knew that her nemesis, writer Lillian Hellman had won the award in 1976, she would have "probably not" accepted it. [8] McCarthy conceded that the fact that her former husband, writer Edmund Wilson, had received the award in 1964 lent credibility to the honor.
Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein won the award in 1987. Bernstein observed that it was the first award he had received solely for musical composition. Bernard Holland, writing in The New York Times, noted that Bernstein had "made full use of the quiet and solitude of this venerable refuge for artists" three times previously, having been a resident there in 1962, 1970 and 1972. [9]
Award winner and writer William Styron spoke at the 1988 awards ceremony. He said that the group of previous winners "represents the brightest constellation of American talent that could be assembled in the latter half of this century", and that "their work has been of supreme value to the world". [10]
Composer Stephen Sondheim, who won the award in 2013, was the first winner with a background in musical theater. [11]
When California artist Betye Saar won the 2014 award, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times commented that she was "joining an elite roster of honorees." [5]
Jazz composer and musician Gunther Schuller was scheduled to receive the 2015 award on his 90th birthday. [12] However, Schuller died June 21, 2015, before he could receive the award. [13]
The Edward MacDowell Medal [14] has been awarded during a free, public ceremony at MacDowell grounds in Peterborough, NH, to such figures as Aaron Copland (1961), Robert Frost (1962), Georgia O'Keeffe (1972), Leonard Bernstein (1987), [9] Stephen Sondheim (2013), and Betye Saar (2014). MacDowell Chair, Fellow, and author Nell Irvin Painter, hosts the ceremony typically held on a summer Sunday in July or August beginning at noon. Following the award ceremony, guests can have picnic lunches before open studio tours, which are hosted by MacDowell artists-in-residence.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited for reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborations with Hal Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim's Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.
Aaron Copland was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as the "Dean of American Composers". The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit. He is best known for the works he wrote in the 1930s and 1940s in a deliberately accessible style often referred to as "populist" and which the composer labeled his "vernacular" style. Works in this vein include the ballets Appalachian Spring, Billy the Kid and Rodeo, his Fanfare for the Common Man and Third Symphony. In addition to his ballets and orchestral works, he produced music in many other genres, including chamber music, vocal works, opera and film scores.
William Clark Styron Jr. was an American novelist and essayist who won major literary awards for his work.
Elmer Bernstein was an American composer and conductor. In a career that spanned over five decades, he composed "some of the most recognizable and memorable themes in Hollywood history", including over 150 original film scores, as well as scores for nearly 80 television productions. For his work he received an Academy Award for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and Primetime Emmy Award. He also received seven Golden Globe Awards, five Grammy Awards, and two Tony Award nominations.
Gunther Alexander Schuller was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician.
Edward Alexander MacDowell was an American composer and pianist of the late Romantic period. He was best known for his second piano concerto and his piano suites Woodland Sketches, Sea Pieces and New England Idylls. Woodland Sketches includes his most popular short piece, "To a Wild Rose". In 1904 he was one of the first seven Americans honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The National Medal of Arts is an award and title created by the United States Congress in 1984, for the purpose of honoring artists and patrons of the arts. A prestigious American honor, it is the highest honor given to artists and arts patrons by the United States government. Nominations are submitted to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory committee of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), who then submits its recommendations to the White House for the President of the United States to award. The medal was designed for the NEA by sculptor Robert Graham.
David Walter Del Tredici is an American composer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and is a former Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellow. Del Tredici is considered a pioneer of the Neo-Romantic movement. He has also been described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of our most flamboyant outsider composers".
Betye Irene Saar is an African American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her art work that critiques American racism toward Blacks.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
The Tanglewood Music Center is an annual summer music academy in Lenox, Massachusetts, United States, in which emerging professional musicians participate in performances, master classes and workshops. The center operates as a part of the Tanglewood Music Festival, an outdoor concert series and the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO).
Marian MacDowell was an American pianist and philanthropist. In 1907, she and her husband Edward MacDowell founded the MacDowell Colony for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Her leadership of the artist retreat through two world wars, the Great Depression and other challenges created one of the foremost cultural institutions in the United States, which cultivated the work of generations of musicians, writers, poets, sculptors, and visual artists.
Two American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medals are awarded each year by the academy for distinguished achievement. The two awards are taken in rotation from these categories:
Daniel Asia is an American composer. He was born in Seattle, Washington, in the United States of America.
João MacDowell is a Brazilian composer known for fusing contemporary and popular styles with classical music. His work includes opera, symphonic, chamber music, and early albums of Brazilian pop. On the occasion of the concert premiere of his fifth opera The Seventh Seal, Swedish journalist Johanna Paulsson of Dagens Nyheter noted the composer as "a new thinker in the genre".
The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) is a residential artist community in Amherst, Virginia, USA. Since 1971, VCCA has offered residencies of varying lengths with flexible scheduling for international artists, writers, and composers at its working retreat in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. VCCA is among the nation's largest artist residency programs, and since 2004, has also offered workshops and retreats at its studio center in Southwest France, Le Moulin à Nef.
New Music USA is a new music organization formed by the merging of the American Music Center with Meet The Composer on November 8, 2011. The new organization retains the granting programs of the two former organizations as well as two media programs originally created at the American Music Center: NewMusicBox and Counterstream Radio.
Michael Stephen Brown is an American classical pianist and composer. He is the recipient of the 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, 2018 Emerging Artist Award from Lincoln Center, and the 2010 Concert Artists Guild Competition. Brown has performed as soloist with the Seattle, Grand Rapids, North Carolina, Maryland and Albany symphony orchestras, and at Carnegie Hall, Caramoor, the Smithsonian, Alice Tully Hall, and the Gilmore Festival. He is an artist at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and is a former member of CMS Two. He regularly performs duo recitals with cellist Nicholas Canellakis. He has received commissions from many organizations and some of today’s leading artists, and recently toured his own Piano Concerto around the US and Poland with several orchestras.
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė is a Lithuanian composer based in New York City. In 2022 she was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts. In 2020 Martinaitytė received Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lithuanian Government Award for Culture and Arts for her creative achievements. Her work In Search of Lost Beauty.... received two gold medals at the Global Music Awards for "Best Composer" and Best Album.