Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth has won the 2022 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for “Orlando,” an opera based on a Virginia Woolf novel about a gender-switching poet whose adventures span more than three centuries. The opera, an unconventional piece embracing a vast range of musical styles from Tudor-era ballads to modern electronic […]
The Grawemeyer Award for Education announces with sorrow the passing of Mike Rose, winner of the 1997 Award for his book “Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America,” Mike Rose focuses on the positive things going on in these classrooms and, through them, offers hope for the future of public education. “Possible Lives” […]
The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition announces with sorrow the passing of Louis Andriessen, winner of the 2011 Award for his large scale opera, La Commedia, based on texts by Dante, in 2011. Maestro Andriessen spent about a week on campus where, among other activities, he gave lessons to University of Louisville composition students, as […]
It is with great sorrow that the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition announces the death of British composer Simon Bainbridge. He won the Award in 1997 for his work Ad Ora Incerta (At the Uncertain Hour), a four-movement song cycle for mezzo soprano, bassoon solo, and orchestra, based on Holocaust-themed poems by Primo Levi. Bainbridge […]
A Polish composer known for sending moral and political messages through his music, died on Sunday at his home in Krakow. He was 86. Krzysztof Penderecki won the Grawemeyer award in 1992 for his symphonic piece, “Adagio for Large Orchestra.” Commissioned by Radio France and the French secretary of state for the 200th anniversary of […]
UofL and Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary announced 2020 winners of the $100,000 Grawemeyer Awards Dec. 2-6. Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate and former seminary trustee, launched the awards program in 1984 to underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world. All of the 2020 award recipients will visit Louisville in April to […]
Due to COVID-19 the 2020 Grawemeyer events scheduled for the week of April 13 including the Banquet and Ceremony have been postponed. We hope to hold the events in the fall and once new dates have been decided an announcement will be made. If there are any questions, please email Charlie Leonard at charlie.leonard@louisville.edu
The news has reached us that the 2009 Grawemeyer Award winner, Australian composer, conductor and violist, Brett Dean, is currently hospitalized in Australia and is confirmed to be stricken with coronavirus. The Grawemeyer community sends him and his family all good wishes for a speedy recovery.
With sadness we announce the death of Dr. Paul Brink on January 29, 2020. Dr. Brink helped shape the processes and procedures of the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, working with Charlie Grawemeyer at the inception of the Award. He directed its Committee for several years before his retirement in 2004. He served the School […]
A religious scholar who explained how one of Christianity’s earliest creeds still applies to contemporary life has earned the 2020 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Stephen J. Patterson, a professor of religious and ethical studies at Willamette University, won the award for ideas he set forth in “The Forgotten Creed: Christianity’s Original Struggle against Bigotry, […]