April 28, 2009

Paul Sayed and Mario Silva

The Wilmer Hayden Welsh Prize in Composition

Established in 2006 in honor of Wilmer Hayden Welsh, composer and Professor of Music at Davidson College from 1963–1991, the Wilmer Hayden Welsh Prize in Composition is awarded annually in the Spring for the best original music composition by a Davidson student from the previous calendar year. [$500 Cash Prize]

2009 recipient – Paul K. Sayed (2010)

The music faculty is pleased to present the 2009 Welsh prize to Paul Sayed A Tango in Yellow. An evocative and beautifully crafted play on Spanish and Latin-American dance styles such as the tango, the flamenco and the samba, the work spins through a kaleidoscope of energetic states, or as the composer describes them, “a feverish hallucination,” beginning Freely a la Flamenco and proceeding along through Steady, Dance, Sweet and Gentle, Feverish and Dizzy, Euphoria, Sweet and Excited, Anxious, Passionate and Fiery.

Paul skillfully utilizes a chromatic palette to render elusive harmonic motion and obscures and distorts the characteristic dance rhythms to seduce us into his vision.

Former Winners:
2008 Mario Alonzo Silva '09, for his composition Ideas for two pianos and C trumpet
2007 Will Winter '07 - for his incidental music for Davidson College’s production of Rupert Barber’s rendition of Sleeping Beauty

The Rufus Hallmark Writing Award

Established in 2006 and named after distinguished musicologist Rufus Hallmark, Davidson class of 1965, the Rufus Hallmark Writing award recognizes the best essay on a musical topic written in the previous year [$500 Cash Prize].

2009 Recipient – Mario Alonzo Silva, Jr. (2009)

The music faculty is pleased to present the 2009 Hallmark award to Mario Silva for his essay, “Between Control and Freedom: The Middleground of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel,” written for MUS 328 last spring. Silva’s essay moves past the obvious connections of Feldman’s style and the visual style of Abstract Expressionism into a more subtle reading of the dynamic conflict at work in this piece, an ongoing struggle, in Silva’s words, “between melody and verticality,” “between the viola and the choir,” and indeed, “between Rothko’s Jewish past and his own death.” In viewing the composition as a meditation on the composer’s own mortality, Silva finds in the music some of the most profound questions any person can ask.

Former Winners
2008 Christopher Parker Hobson '09, “Mécanique romantique: A Neo-Romantic Analysis of the Ultramodern”
2007: Molly Barnes '09, "Franz Josef Haydn: Humble Man of the People?"
2007: Mejin Leechor '08, “The Old in the New: Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”