2023 COMPOSITION CONTEST

WINNER: Gilad Cohen A Dark Matter

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Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is thrilled to perform A Dark Matter during our 2024-25 season.

Praised by the 2010 Israeli Prime Minister Award Committee for “creating a personal language fusion that has a unique dimension” in music that is “fascinating, vibrant and drawing the ear as well as the heart,” Gilad Cohen is an active composer, performer, and theorist in various musical genres including concert music, rock, and music for theater. His music adapts features from a wide range of musical realms and explores possible interactions among them, bringing to his creative table the persistent textures of rock, the painstaking orchestration of impressionism, the gloomy harmonies of grunge and metal, the jubilant rhythms of klezmer, the motionless landscapes of psychedelic rock, the agile melodies and scales of Arabic music, and the striking dissonances of 20th-century avant-garde. 

Gilad has received commissions from Barlow Endowment, ASCAP, Chamber Music America, Concert Artists Guild, Parlance Chamber Concerts, Houston Arts Alliance, and Jerusalem Music Center, among others. His music was performed in North and South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle-East by artists such as the Israeli Chamber Project, Nash Ensemble of London, Brentano Quartet, Mivos Quartet, PUBLIQuartet, principal players of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Budapest Festival Orchestra, pianists Anne-Marie McDermott, Benjamin Hochman, and Spencer Myer, violinists Itamar Zorman and Miranda Cuckson, and violist Paul Neubauer, and his works were released on Albany Records, Naxos/Delos, and Navona Records. Gilad’s notable awards include the Barlow Prize, the Israeli Prime Minister Award for Composers, and prizes from the American Liszt Society, Lin Yao Ji Music Foundation (China), Franz Josef Reinl Foundation (Austria). His music for the stage includes the monodrama Dragon Mother for soprano and orchestra, the one-act musical Healthy Start, and music for various productions in the US and Israel including Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan, and Nissim Aloni’s Napoleon – Dead or Alive!. Current commitments include a harp concerto for Sivan Magen, and a piece about black singer/activist Paul Robeson for rapper and large ensemble, co-written with lyricist Ronvé O’Daniel. 

Gilad has played piano, bass guitar and guitar with various ensembles at venues in the US, Canada, Mexico and Israel including New York’s Merkin Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Symphony Space. His research about the music of Pink Floyd has resulted in publications in books and academic journals (such as Music Theory Spectrum), lectures in the US and Israel, and the first-ever academic conference devoted to the band that he produced in 2014 at Princeton University together with composer Dave Molk. An Associate Professor of Music at Ramapo College of New Jersey, Gilad holds a Ph.D. in Composition from Princeton University and is a graduate of Mannes School of Music, the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, and BMI Lehman Engel Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop. His principal teachers include Robert Cuckson, Steven Mackey, Paul Lanskey, and Michael Wolpe. www.giladcohen.com 

Honorable Mention:

Paul Novak entwining

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The "spellbinding" (Washington Post) music of Chicago-based composer Paul Novak immerses listeners in shimmering and subtly crafted musical worlds full of color, motion, light, and magic. Rejecting grandiose narratives, his work is driven by a love of small things - miniature forms, delicate soundscapes, and condensed ideas - and guided by a sense of empathy for the performers playing his music. 

Novak was the recipient of a 2023 Barlow Endowment Commission for a new work for Balourdet Quartet, and of the 2020 American Composers Orchestra Underwood Commission for a new orchestral work that the ACO will premiere in Carnegie Hall; he has also received commissions from ASCAP and Society of Composers, Inc., Music from Copland House, Lynx, Quatuor Lontano, the Boston New Music Initiative, Blackbox Ensemble, and Kinetic Ensemble. He was selected for a 2022 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received other recent honors from the ASCAP Foundation, Red Note Competition, League of Composers/ISCM, Lake George Music Festival, and National Association of Composers of the USA, among others. Novak was featured in the Washington Post's "23 for '23: Composers and Performers to Watch this Year," where he was praised for his "impressive range and restless energy" in a catalog spanning "lithe, elastic vocal pieces...vibrant orchestral works...and evocative etudes for string quartet." Other recent collaborators include the Austin Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, Reno Philharmonic, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, DanceWorks Chicago, Sandbox Percussion, Ekmeles, Quince Ensemble, Decoda, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, LIGAMENT Duo, and Tribeca New Music. Upcoming projects include commissioned works for InfraSound Ensemble, Quatuor Lontano, American Composers Orchestra, and a micro-concerto for cellist Dmitri Atapine. 

Collaboration and interdisciplinarity are at the center of Novak's creative practice, and his recent work has been driven by a passion for working with text, an attunement to the embodied experiences of musicians, and a fascination with collective, social aspects of performance. His work draws inspiration from literature, visual art, dance, and poetry, from biological and astronomical phenomena, and from history and myth. His recent projects have included collaborations with poets, visual artists, dancers, choreographers, and a spoken word artist.
 
Originally from Reno, NV, he completed his undergraduate studies at Rice University, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Chicago, where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas.

Past winners:

  • 2022 Tomàs Peire-Serrate Five Haiku

    • Second Place: Daniel Sabzghabaei At any rate II. باقی مانده "what remains”

    • Honorable Mentions:

      Paul Novak a string quartet is like a flock of birds

      Aaron Levin Snow Fragments

  • 2020 Sarah Westwood's Things You Don’t Yet Know You Feel

    • Honorable Mention:

      Felipe Tovar-Henao: ...de lo voluble...

  • 2019 Sarah Gibson: I prefer living in color

    • Honorable Mentions:

      Luk Wai Chun Vincent: Bian lian

      Pascal Le Boeuf: Imp in impulse

  • 2018 Charles Peck: Sunburst [video]

    • Honorable Mentions:

      Jack Frerer: Downloads

      Daniel Harrison: Give Up the Ghost

      Stephen Yip: Luminosity Etude

  • 2017 Chiayu Hsu: Rhapsody Toccata [video]

  • 2016 Melody Eötvös: House of the Beehives [video]

  • 2015 Christopher Stark: Piano Quartet 2014 [video]

  • 2014 Felix Leuschner: Krieg ohne Schlacht [video]

  • 2013 Michael-Thomas Foumai: Scat

  • 2012 Ryan Carter: too many arguments in line 17

  • 2011 Mike Solomon: Anonymous Student Compliment or Complaint

  • 2010 Steven Snowden

  • 2009 Matthew Barnson: String Quartet

  • 2008 Stephen Feigenbaum: Boiling Point for string quartet

  • 2007 Moritz Eggert

  • 2006 Carl Schimmel

  • 2005 Justin Merritt

  • 2004 Claude Baker

  • 2003 Bruno Ruviaro

  • 2002 Tamar Muskal

  • 2001 Gabriel Vine

  • 2000 Yehuda Yannay

photo credit (strings): Jeanette Yu