Pablo Ortiz Wins American Academy Music Award
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced its 2008 Music Award Winners list, which includes Pablo Ortiz, UC Davis professor of music and composer of chamber, vocal, orchestral, and electronic music. Ortiz is one of four composers to receive an Academy Award in Music, which honors outstanding artistic achievement in composition. The award will be presented at the academy’s annual ceremony in May.
Based in New York City, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers dedicated to fostering and sustaining an interest in music, literature and the fine arts by identifying and encouraging individual artists. Members, including artist and UC Davis professor Wayne Thiebaud and writer John Updike, make awards annually to four composers, three architects, five artists, and eight writers.
"It is very gratifying to receive this recognition," Ortiz said. From his award money, Ortiz said he intends to make a donation to the UC Davis Department of Music to name a seat in the department's planned new recital hall in honor of his mother, Olga Salguero, a music lover and pianist. He also wants to make donations to the Davis Joint Unified School District to help offset budget cuts that threaten to weaken school music programs next year.
Ortiz, a native of Buenos Aires, completed an undergraduate degree at the Universidad Catolica Argentina before moving to New York, where he earned a master's and Ph.D. in music composition at Columbia University. He joined UC Davis in 1994.
Ortiz's past awards include a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won commissions from the Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard, the San Francisco-based Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, Centro Experimental Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and Fideicomiso para la Cultura Mexico/USA.
His compositions have been performed by the Buenos Aires Philarmonic, the Arditti String Quartet, the Ensemble Contrechamps of Geneva, Music Mobile, Continuum, Les Percussions de Strasbourg, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Chanticleer, and the Theatre of Voices. His music has also been heard at international festivals in Salzburg, Geneva, Strasbourg, Havana, Frankfurt, Zurich, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. He has also written music for plays and films and composed children's songs based on poems by award-winning poet Francisco Alarcon, a lecturer in Spanish and classics at UC Davis.
Ortiz's work will next be performed on Thursday, April 17, at a free Noon Concert on campus. Tenor Ian Howell will perform works by Ortiz as well as Bach and Handel. The concert will take place from 12:05–1:00 pm in the Main Theatre in Wright Hall.
Hipermilonga, a work by Ortiz for violin, clarinet, and piano, will be performed at a 7 pm concert of the Adorno Ensemble on Friday, May 30, in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco de Young Museum, 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive, Golden Gate Park. For more information, visit AdornoEnsemble.org.