Donald Grantham (b. 1947) is professor of music composition at the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music, where he is the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Professor of Music. In addition to his studies at the American Conservatory in France under Nadia Boulanger, Grantham holds music degrees from the University of Oklahoma and from the University of Southern California.
Grantham has written commissioned works for many ensembles, including the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Cleveland, and Dallas. He also collaborated with fellow composer Kent Kennan to author the textbook The Technique of Orchestration.
Grantham has received numerous awards and prizes in composition, including the Prix Lili Boulanger, the Nissim/ASCAP Orchestral Composition Prize, First Prize in the Concordia Chamber Symphony's Awards to American Composers, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, three First Prizes in the NBA/William Revelli Competition, and First Prize in the National Opera Association's Biennial Composition Competition.
Fantasy Variations, winner of the 1999 ABA/Ostwald Award, is an original composition inspired by George Gershwin’s 1936 Prelude II for solo piano.
Peter Graham (b. 1958 Lanarkshire, Scotland) is the first composer living outside the United States to win the Sousa/Ostwald award. After teaching composition for many years at the University of Salford, he now composes full-time. He has previously served as Music Associate with the famous Black Dyke Band (1997–2004) and as composer-in-residence with Her Majesty's Coldstream Guards Band. Graham received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in composition from University of London’s Goldsmiths College, where he studied with Edward Gregson.
Graham has worked regularly as an arranger for BBC Television and Radio and has specialized in composition for the British style brass band. He lived briefly in New York City where he served as a freelance composer, arranger, and publications editor with the S.A. Music Bureau.
Graham’s compositions have been recorded and performed by many of the world’s leading ensembles, including the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra and the Royal Norwegian Navy Band. His album of xylophone music commissioned for virtuoso Evelyn Glennie by BMG/RCA Red Label, was nominated as Best Classical Crossover Album at the 1999 Grammy Awards held in Los Angeles.
Harrison's Dream, commissioned by the United States Air Force Band in Washington, D.C., won the 2002 ABA Ostwald Award for composition. The work is inspired by clockmaker John Harrison’s efforts to develop a life-saving nautical navigation instrument in the early 1700s.
2005: John Mackey, Redline TangoJohn Mackey (b. 1973) holds degrees from the Juilliard School and the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with John Corigliano and Donald Erb, respectively. He has received commissions from the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Parsons Dance Company, the New York Youth Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra, the Dallas Theater Center, New York City Ballet, the Dallas Wind Symphony, the American Bandmasters Association, and many universities, high schools, middle schools, and military bands. His trombone concerto, Harvest, composed for New York Philharmonic principal trombonist Joseph Alessi, has received dozens of performances worldwide and been commercially recorded three times. Mackey has served as composer-in-residence at the Cabrillo Contemporary Music Festival, the Vail Valley Music Festival, and with youth orchestras in Minneapolis and Seattle.
Mackey won the ABA/Ostwald Prize in 2005 for Redline Tango, an arrangement for wind ensemble of a work originally commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic. He received the Ostwald Award again in 2009 for Aurora Awakes, which also received the NBA/Revelli Prize. Mackey was inducted into the American Bandmasters Association in 2013.
Redline Tango
Aurora Awakes
2007: Michael Daugherty, Raise the RoofBorn into a musical family in Iowa, Michael Daugherty (b. 1954) earned degrees in music composition from North Texas State University, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Yale School of Music, where he studied with Jacob Druckman, Earle Brown, and Roger Reynolds. Since 1992, he has taught composition at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Daugherty has been a composer-in-residence with numerous orchestras, including the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, and has received commissions from dozens of ensembles in the United States and Europe. The League of American Orchestras reports that he is one of the ten most performed living American composers. Daugherty has received numerous awards, distinctions, and fellowships for his music, including the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for his compositions Snap! and Blue Like an Orange, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and three Grammy awards.
Many of Daugherty’s compositions draw from jazz and popular music and are directly inspired by popular culture, including his Metropolis Symphony, Dead Elvis, and Jackie O. Raise the Roof, a concerto for timpani and concert band which won the ABA Ostwald Award in 2007, was commissioned and premiered by the University of Michigan Symphonic Band. The composer notes that the work was inspired by the construction of grand architectural wonders such as the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Empire State Building in New York City.
