The Department of Music's Visiting Fellow in Composition, Prof John Casken has been awarded the inaugural Tippett Medal for Composition.
The Tippett Medal is a new prize for composition awarded by the Royal Musical Association. The award welcomed 54 submissions from a wide variety of compositional practices, including acoustic pieces, music for voice, acousmatic music, and mixed instrumental and electronic works. All submissions underwent a blind review process.
The winner of the inaugural 2020 Tippett Medal is John Casken for The Shackled King, drama for bass, mezzo-soprano and ensemble based on Shakespeare’s King Lear. The jury stated: “The winning piece exhibited a level of creative excellence which was impossible to ignore. Imaginatively presented and ideally matching the quality of the composition, a piece which demands a rich future life.”