Gotham Chamber Opera Now Accepting Applications for Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music

Gotham Chamber Opera and the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation announce the inaugural cycle of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music, a competitive prize awarded to a composer to support the creation of a new work for voice and chamber ensemble. For more information and to apply for this commissioning award, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org/registration. The deadline to apply is April 1, 2014.

The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music will be a bi-annual award of $15,000 to a composer for the creation of a new work for voice and chamber ensemble of between 3 and 10 acoustic instruments (some guidelines will apply) and between 15 and 30 minutes in length. Given the inherent challenges of writing idiomatically for the human voice, a goal of the competition is to successfully enlarge the repertoire of works for voice and instruments. The prizewinner's completed work will be premiered under the aegis of Gotham Chamber Opera.

The application is open to composers, emerging and established, over 21 years of age and residing in the United States. The deadline for submissions is April 1, 2014. During the first phase, applications will be evaluated according to their adherence to the guidelines. In the second phase, the review committee will hear all approved submissions and select finalists to present to the jury. During the third phase, the jury will evaluate the finalists' selections and award a prize to one composer.

After the award winner is announced, on August 1, 2014, the composer will have nine months to complete the new work. The premiere will be performed by a singer and instrumentalists associated with Gotham Chamber Opera within a year of the work's completion. Gotham Chamber Opera Artistic Director Neal Goren will be available to consult with the composer on questions pertaining to vocal writing during the process of composition. Limited assistance will be available to secure rights for published texts, if needed. A travel allowance will be provided for composers residing outside New York City to help with costs of attending the rehearsals and premiere of the award-winning work.

Catherine Doctorow was a serious and prolific painter whose work, in a contemporary idiom, flourished in the 1950s and '60s. The Catherine Doctorow Prize for Music is the third of three major recurring prizes to be established by her family and the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation to honor and perpetuate Doctorow's love of innovative literary fiction, the visual arts, and music.

The Mission of the Jarvis & Constance Doctorow Family Foundation is to nurture individuals and communities through the support of arts and mental health programs. The Foundation's Funding Philosophy is to support projects that focus on the provision of mental health services as well as organizations focused on performance, literary, and visual arts. JCDFF funds organizations that maintain a standard of excellence throughout the range of their work.

Gotham Chamber Opera, now in its twelfth season, is the nation's leading opera company dedicated to vibrant, fully staged productions of works intended for intimate venues. Its high quality presentations of small-scale rarities from the Baroque era to the present have earned Gotham an international reputation and unanimous critical praise.

Founded by conductor and Artistic Director Neal Goren, Gotham debuted in 2001 (as Henry Street Chamber Opera) with the American premiere of Mozart's Il sogno di Scipione. In subsequent seasons, Gotham has produced many more local and world premieres, including such works as Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Milhaud's Les Malheurs d'Orphée, Bohuslav Martinu's Les Larmes du Couteau and Hlas Lesa, Sutermeister's Die schwarze Spinne, Handel's Arianna in Creta, Britten's Albert Herring, and Rossini's Il Signor Bruschino. The company renamed itself Gotham Chamber Opera and became an independent 501(c)3 organization in 2003.

Gotham has partnered with notable New York and national institutions, including Lincoln Center Festival and Spoleto USA for the 2005 production of Respighi's La bella dormente nel bosco; the Morgan Library and Museum for Scenes of Gypsy Life (an evening of song cycles by Janá?ek and Dvo?ák) in 2008; and the American Museum of Natural History and the American Repertory Theater for the 2010 production of Hadyn's Il mondo della luna. That production featured lunar exploration video developed by the Museum and NASA and broadcast on the Hayden Planetarium's 180-degree dome.

Gotham has earned a reputation for showcasing outstanding young singers alongside established directors and choreographers such as Mark Morris (the 2009 production of Hadyn's L'isola disabitata), David Parsons (the New York stage premiere of Astor Piazzola's tango opera, María di Buenos Aires), Karole Armitage (the world premiere of Ariadne Unhinged), Basil Twist (La bella), Christopher Alden (Scipione and Arianna in Creta), and Diane Paulus (Il mondo). In October 2010, Gotham partnered with director Moisés Kaufmann and his company, Tectonic Theater Project, to co-produce the first United States stage performances of Xavier Montsalvatge's El Gato con Botas, at the New Victory Theater.

For the 2011/2012 season, Gotham celebrated its tenth anniversary with the world premiere of Dark Sisters, by Nico Muhly, and a revival of its first production, Mozart's Il sogno di Scipione. Moving into its second decade in 2013, Gotham presented a sold-out run of Cavalli's Eliogabalo at The Box and two performances of Daniel Catán's La Hija di Rappaccini (Rappaccini's Daughter) at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Esplanade. That production then toured to Los Angeles, where it was presented by the Broad Stage at the Greystone Manor in Beverly Hills. In October 2013, the company presented Baden-Baden 1927, a fully-staged production of the quadruple bill of short chamber operas by Hindemith, Toch, Milhaud, and Weill, premiered at the legendary Baden-Baden Festival of Contemporary Music performance of July 17, 1927. Gotham Chamber Opera's 2013/2014 season continued with a co-production with Trinity Church Wall Street, Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La descente d'Orphée aux enfers from January 1-5, 2014.

In February, the company will present a double bill co-produced with and staged at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, consisting of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Monteverdi, and a newly commissioned work, I Have No Stories to Tell You, by Gotham Chamber Opera Composer-In-Residence Lembit Beecher. The United States premiere of The Raven by Toshio Hosokawa at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater concludes the season in May 2014 as part of the New York Philharmonic's inaugural NY PHIL BIENNIAL.

For more information, visit www.gothamchamberopera.org.