of art & design
Composer J. Mark Scearce, Director of the Music Department at NC State, has been awarded the 2009 International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in Music Composition.
The purpose of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Music Composition Prize is to provide financial support for the creation of new musical works as a part of the mission of the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut, promoting innovation, inventiveness, and the creative spirit.
The international Sackler Prize in Composition offers substantial recognition including performances, recordings, and a prize of $20,000. The 2009 Prize commissions a work for Cello and Orchestra, to be premiered in March 2011.
Dr. J. Mark Scearce is Director of the Music Department at NC State. Prior appointments were on the music faculties of the Universities of Hawaii, North Texas, and Southern Maine, among others. With fifty active titles in his catalogue, including musical settings of more than 120 texts, Scearce’s many works for orchestra, band, chorus, opera, chamber, and ballet have been performed throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.
The recipient of five advanced degrees in music, philosophy and religion, including the doctorate in composition from Indiana University, Scearce has now won six international music competitions, his music honored by the Wellesley Composers’ Conference, the June in Buffalo Festival, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the American Music Center, and the artist colonies of Yaddo, Ucross, and MacDowell.
His wide-ranging interests have led him to compose works inspired by contemporary issues and spiritual concerns. This Thread, a setting of Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s poem “The Dead of September 11,” was premiered by Orchestra Nashville in 2004, and Gaea’s Lament for solo cello was heard at a symposium on global climate change in 2007. Like other philosopher-artists before him, Scearce makes us think with his music, but more importantly feel.
Scearce currently has seven works commercially available on compact disc on the Albany, Delos, Warner Bros, Capstone, Centaur, and Equilibrium labels, and on a Sony 4-channel SACD online at frystreetquartet.com.
The Sackler name is well known in philanthropic circles with schools, museums, institutes, and prizes bearing their name; named galleries in the Smithsonian in Washington and in the Metropolitan in New York are two notable examples. In addition to the Sackler Prize in Music Composition, Raymond and Beverly Sackler endow international prizes in Chemistry and Biophysics. Scearce is the first NC State faculty to win a Sackler Prize in any category.