Music professor receives Guggenheim Fellowship for research and artistic creation

Music professor receives Guggenheim Fellowshipfor research and artistic creationApril 29, 2005Jaime Winne Alvarez jlwinne@syr.edu

Andrew Waggoner, associate professor in Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, is the recipient of a 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship Award for research and artistic creation. Waggoner teaches musical composition and theory in VPA’s Rose, Jules R. and Stanford S. Setnor School of Music and is a New York City-based composer. With his fellowship monies, he will go on leave this fall to compose a large-scale work for the New York-based contemporary music ensemble Sequitur. He will also write a concerto for four cellos and orchestra for the quartet CELLO and several U.S. orchestras, all for premiere in 2006-07. He will perform in New York and France with Open End, a chamber ensemble that he and wife Caroline Stinson, also a Setnor faculty member, formed.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provides fellowships for advanced professionals in the natural and social sciences, humanities and creative arts. Fellows are appointed on the basis of distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment. What distinguishes the Guggenheim Fellowship program from others is the wide range in interest, age, geography and institution of those it selects.

“Andy is not only one of our most prolific composers and performers, he is also an incredible teacher and a true ‘renaissance man,'” says Carole Brzozowski, dean of VPA. “He has made a significant impact on the college and the Setnor School of Music, and I am thrilled that he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship. It will help him continue to develop a national presence in composition for himself and for the University.”

This year 186 fellows were selected from among more than 3,000 applicants, with awards totaling $7,112,000. The 2005 fellows include writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, film makers, choreographers, physical and biological scientists, social scientists and scholars. Many of these individuals hold appointments in colleges and universities, with 79 institutions represented by one or more 2005 Fellows. Forty-seven fellows have no academic or university affiliation.

Fellowship award decisions are based on recommendations from expert advisors and are approved by the Foundation’s Board of Trustees. Since 1925, the foundation has granted almost $240 million in fellowships to more than 15,500 individuals, including Nobel Prize laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners, among others. Previous fellowship recipients include Ansel Adams, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger and Martha Graham.

Waggoner’s works have been performed by the Corigliano, Miro and Cassatt Quartets; the Denver, Syracuse and St. Louis Symphonies; the Los Angeles Philharmonic; the Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic of Zlin, Czech Republic; the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble; Sequitur; the Empyrean Ensemble; and Buglisi-Foreman Dance. He has released CDs of his work, including “Legacy” on CRI/New World, as well as releases on the Vienna Modern Masters and Fleur du son labels. In 2003 he won the Lee Ettelson Prize from Composers, Inc., San Francisco. He is an expert on composition, improvisation, musicology, theory and violin.