New England Philharmonic Announces Winner of 2024 Call for Scores Competition
BOSTON — The New England Philharmonic is one of the few volunteer orchestras in the country with a Composer-in-Residence program and a Call for Scores competition, both initiated in 1985. For this year’s 39th annual Call for Scores, the NEP received more than 50 submissions from composers all over the world. After careful review of the submissions, Composer-in-Residence Eric Nathan, Music Director Tian Ng, and a committee of orchestra musicians selected Bobby Ge’s composition Remember to Have Fun as the winning work, which will be performed by the NEP in the 2024-25 season.
Bobby Ge is a Chinese-American composer and avid collaborator who explores themes of communication and hybridity through works that navigate boundaries between genre and medium. He has created multimedia projects with the Space Telescope Science Institute, painters collective Art10Baltimore, the Scattered Players Theater Company, and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.
Winner of the 2022 Barlow Prize, Ge has received commissions and performances by groups including the Minnesota Orchestra, the New York Youth Symphony, the Albany Symphony, the U.S. Navy Band, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, among others. He is currently pursuing his PhD at Princeton University, and holds degrees from UC Berkeley and the Peabody Conservatory.
Beginning as a mixed quintet written for conductor Matthew Jenkins Jaroszewicz, Remember to Have Fun is intended to remind Ge that he should, in all things musical, have fun. Cast in three continuous movements, the piece is a triptych recontextualizing a handful of simple motifs into three different kinds of fun: Master of None, Think About What You’ve Done, and Remember to Have Fun.
The NEP is also pleased to announce this year’s finalists. Their works will be promoted over the coming season on the orchestra’s social media channels, including spotlight interviews with composer-in-residence Eric Nathan. The finalists and their selected works are: Eugene Astapov (Sinfonia for the Journey of Souls), Jyun-Rong Ho (Inspiration of Kenroku-En), Vera Ivanova (Variations on Chords: Distances), Marco Jimenez (In Nomine Patris), Evans Koçja: (Mysteres de léspace), Gillian Rae Perry (I'm Sorry to My Body), Daniel Reza Sabzhgabaei (Hommage a Khaleqi), Roger Zare (Fractal Miniatures).