Gaudeamus Award 2027

Application for the Gaudeamus Award 2027 is now open! The Gaudeamus Award is our yearly incentive prize for young composers. Ever since the first winner (Peter Schat in 1957) the Award has been a kickstart for the career of many composers. Composers/creators of any nationality or background who were born after 12 September 1991 may enter their works. 

A maximum of four composers will be nominated for the Award. The nominees will be part of the Gaudeamus Festival 2027 (8-12 September 2027). On the final night of the festival the winner of the Award will be chosen by an independent jury. The prize consists of a commission worth €6,000 for a new work to be premiered at a future edition of the Gaudeamus Festival. The nominees’ main entries for the competition will be performed during the festival. They will also be commissioned to develop a new piece especially for the festival. After the festival, Gaudeamus will continue to support the nominated composers. Selected works may be performed elsewhere, and composers will be regularly involved in festivals and co-productions with other organizations. The intention is to further the career development of young composers.

Jury
The formation of the jury is crucial for a broad selection of nominees. We always form the jury with composers/performers/tutors, representing the broad spectrum of contemporary music. As a rule, the jury members are all educators as well, at a school or privately, and the jury members will coach the nominees during the preparations for the festival. For 2027, the jury consists of Sarah Hennies, Thanasis Deligiannis and Marcela Lucatelli.

Sarah Hennies (USA) is a composer based in Ithaca, NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues including queer & trans identity, love, intimacy, psychoacoustics, and percussion. She is primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art.

Thanasis Deligiannis (Greece) is a transdisciplinary artist, director and composer based in Amsterdam. His work merges sound, video, space and technology to create hybrid, performative experiences. He has been artist-in-residence at Onassis Culture, Gaudeamus (supported by the Performing Arts Fund NL – Nieuwe Makers), the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Muziekgebouw Productiehuis in Amsterdam. Since 2018, Deligiannis has been teaching at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, where he developed the master’s course Transdisciplinary Approaches,

Marcela Lucatelli (Brazil) is hailed as one of the most innovative vocalists and composers of her generation. Born in Brazil and based in Denmark, Lucatelli has earned international recognition for her extremely original, sensuous and politically charged performance works. A critic once referred to her works as ‘scores for the limits of body and voice’. In 2021, Marcela Lucatelli held a seminar at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts on the topic of ‘Decolonizing the Voice of Sublimity’. In simple terms: stripping away the pretense. And, in her work, Lucatelli does exactly that. For Lucatelli, a stage is not merely a place for musical performance, but rather an arena in which the struggle for art, humor, and even life itself takes place.

Side Reader Procedure
In the initial selection process the jury will be supported by three side readers to create a longlist, which will be looked into in detail by the jury. In this first phase, each of the jury members look at ⅓ of the submissions. Simultaneously, the side readers will also look at ⅓ of the submissions, but divided in a different way. We ensure that all the submissions are reviewed by at least one jury member and that all the submissions are viewed by two pairs of eyes. The whole process is chaired by the Gaudeamus team. With this recently renewed procedure we ensure that, despite the increasing amount of submissions each year, all the submissions are reviewed with the care they deserve. The side readers this year are Meriç Artaç, Nicholas Morrish, and Alison Isadora.