Musiqa Announces 2022 Emerging Composer Winners

In an ongoing effort to increase professional opportunities for emerging composers, Musiqa has selected two early career composers to write new works for its MUSIQA MIXER series at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

The Musiqa Artistic Board has chosen Eric Estrada Valadez, a doctoral student at University of Houston Moores School of Music as 2022-23 Emerging Composer Fellow. The Emerging Composer Fellowship identifies promising artistic talent and provides mentoring from acclaimed Houston area composers, and professional opportunities in an innovative contemporary music chamber ensemble.

The Musiqa Artistic Board has chosen Oswald Huỳnh for its Emerging Composer Commission program, a national competition for early career composers. Mr. Huỳnh is a freelance composer based in Portland, Oregon. Chicago-based composer Paul Novak was selected as the runner up for this award.

Oswald Huỳnh is a composer whose works navigate Vietnamese aesthetics and tradition, language and translation, and the relationship between heritage and identity. Huỳnh writes music that explores timbre and texture to create evocative soundscapes rooted in storytelling, culture, and memory. His orchestral work Gia Đình calls to these ideas by exploring the impact of intergenerational trauma, cultural inheritance, and what is lost between eras. Huỳnh's latest work for orchestra, Beauty despite daylight, draws musical inspiration from ru con-traditional Vietnamese lullabies-and engages with themes of home, kinship, and isolation.

As a composer, Huỳnh has been commissioned, premiered, and performed by artists such as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, Pacific Chamber Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Akropolis Reed Quintet, Tacet(i) Ensemble, [Switch~ Ensemble], Del Sol String Quartet, Fear No Music, deaf rabbit duo, percussionist Payton MacDonald, composer/clarinetist Yoshiaki Onishi, and saxophonist Leo Schlaifer. Huỳnh's music has been presented at the Mizzou International Composers Festival, Bay View Music Festival, New Music on the Bayou Festival, Powell Hall, Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, International Composition Institute of Thailand, Arts Letters & Numbers, Ear Taxi Festival, Constellation, Oregon Bach Festival, Northwestern University New Music Conference, The Sheldon Concert Hall, and Wintergreen Music Festival, among others. He is the winner of the IPO Classical Evolve Composer Competition (2022), Black Bayou Composition Award (2022), Rena J. Ratte Memorial Award (2019), and has received recognition from the New York Youth Symphony and Pacific Chamber Orchestra. Huỳnh will serve as the Composer-in-Residence with the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra for their 2023/24 season. Huỳnh holds a Bachelor of Arts from Lewis & Clark College and a Master of Music from the University of Missouri. He is currently working as a freelance composer in Portland, Oregon, and is teaching music theory with the Portland Youth Philharmonic. His principal teachers include Texu Kim, Carolina Heredia, Stefan Freund, and Michael Johanson.

With a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Composition from UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Eric Estrada Valadez's work has been featured in México, Canada, USA, and Germany. In the last few years, he has earned the Arturo Márquez Composition Award (2019), the International Composers Competition New Symphony Vienna (2020), and the National Composition Competition for Percussion Quartet SAFA (2019), for his composition work. Eric has been the recipient of the Young Creators Program of the Fine Arts Institute of Mexico (2021), and the Graduate Scholarship of UNAM (2018) grants. In his works, Eric blends different music genres, such as rock, jazz and latino music, with contemporary composition, and explores the relationship between language, cultural identity, and music. He has recently been accepted to the Doctor of Musical Arts Composition Program at the Moores School of Music, University of Houston, and was awarded a Graduate Tuition Fellowship.

Rejecting grandiose narratives, the music of Chicago-based composer Paul Novak is driven by a love of small things: miniature forms, delicate soundscapes, and condensed ideas. His compositions, which draw influence from literature, art, and poetry, have been performed throughout the United States and abroad. Novak was selected for a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has recently received honors from the ASCAP Foundation and National Association of Composers of the USA. He has received commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, ASCAP and Society of Composers, Inc., Music from Copland House, the Boston New Music Initiative, Blackbox Ensemble, and Kinetic Ensemble. In recognition of being a runner up in this year's competition, Musiqa will perform an existing work of Novak's during the 2022-2023 season.

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