Applications Now Open for The 2025 LunART Composers Hub

November 15, 2024 / Frank J. Oteri
The Six Participants in the 2024 LunART Composers Hub with 2024 LunART Composer-in-Residence Melinda Wagner (center)

Applications are open from today, 15 November 2024, until 15 January 2025 for the 2025 LunART Composers Hub, an annual week-long intensive professional development program for six female composers held during the LunART Festival in Madison, Wisconsin USA, a festival celebrating contemporary and well as historic female composers. Participating in the LunART Composers Hub is an opportunity open to transgender and cis women aged 18 or older from all over the world. Each year an international acclaimed female composer serves as the festival’s Composer-in-Residence, offering masterclasses, private lessons, and personalized mentorship for all Hub participants. ISCM Honorary Member Chen Yi will serve as the Composer-in-Residence for the 2025 LunART Festival which takes place from 27 May to 1 June 2025.

Chen Yi

Established in 2018 by Serbian flutist, educator, and arts entrepreneur Iva Ugrčić, LunART supports, inspires, promotes, and celebrates ALL women in the arts through public performances, exhibitions, workshops, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The Composers Hub was created to provide an alternative to the typical composition workshop where women are the vast minority. It provides a rare opportunity for ambitious women musicians to develop professionally and personally among others with shared experiences. LunART strives to close the gender gap by providing our composers with career tools to excel in the competitive world of music. Previous Composers-in-Residence have been Jenni Brandon (2018), Valerie Coleman (2019), Stacy Garrop (2022), Dorothy Chang (2023), and Melinda Wagner (2024).

In addition to working with Dr. Chen Yi, the six applicants chosen to participate in the LunART Composers Hub will receive:
● “Copyright for Creatives: What Composers Need to Know,” a two-part workshop with Attorney Elizabeth Russell, arts law specialist;
● Personal finance and career coaching with Dr. Iva Ugrčić, Artistic Wealth Coach;
● a Festival performance of the submitted composition;
● a Professional audio and video recording of the live performance;
● Collaborative rehearsal with performers;
● Admission to all 2025 festival events.

Eligible composers interested in applying should submit a PDF score and audio recording of a 7 to 10 minute work for up to five instruments written no earlier than 1 January 2022, an up to 200 word program note about the work, an up to 100 word bio, and an up to 250 essay explaining what you hope to gain from the experience and why you would like to participate. Incomplete applications will not be considered. There is no application fee but for participants accepted to the program there is a $1050 tuition fee. Further details (such as available instruments, descriptions of and costs for available lodgings, etc.) are available on the LunART website.

Frank J. Oteri

 

Frank J. Oteri

New York City-based composer and music journalist Frank J. Oteri is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the College of Performing Arts at The New School as well as Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM). In his own musical compositions, which have been described as “distinctive” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, Oteri combines emotional directness with an obsession for formal processes. His most recent work, Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow, received its world premiere performance by the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Delta David Gier in January 2021. MACHUNAS, a performance oratorio created with visual artist Lucio Pozzi and inspired by the life of Fluxus-founder George Maciunas, premiered in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2005. Oteri received the 2007 Victor Herbert Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) and the 2018 Composers Now Visionary Award.