Two ACO Students Honored in 2020 American Composers Forum NextNotes High School Music Creator Awards

Two of ACO’s Compose Yourself students have been recognized in the sixth annual NextNotes® High School Music Creator Awards, a program of American Composers Forum (ACF). NextNotes is a national program designed to nurture the next generation of creative voices in music inclusive of all styles. The talented young artists convene as a cohort and receive mentorship, scholarship funds, and recognition through a national awards ceremony. Charlotte Weinstein won with her work Disequilibrium for string quartet, create in the 2019 summer Compose Yourself intensive and ACO student Abby Harris was awarded an honorable mention.
To read about the other five awardees, please click here.
CHARLOTTE WEINSTEIN (BROOKLYN, NY): DISEQUILIBRIUM FOR STRING QUARTET
Charlotte lives in Brooklyn and goes to school in Queens, New York, where she is a freshman at Bard High School Early College Queens. She plays cello with her school orchestra and with the Kaufman Music Center’s Face the Music Philharmonic, a youth orchestra that exclusively plays work of living composers. A lot of her influences and ideas for composing come from contemporary composers whose work she played there. She has also played piano, her first instrument, and even played trombone for a year with Visionary Youth Orchestra led by William Parker, Melanie Dyer, and Kyoko Kitamura, among others. She learned from William Parker that, during improvisation, no note is random, and so she thinks that sometimes even the concepts that don’t emerge in composing deliberately are worth expression. Her first composing classes were with Face the Music and the American Composers Orchestra. She thinks that the world she is currently living in should be reflected in the music we hear now.
American Composers Orchestra is grateful to the many organizations that make its programs possible including Arthur F. & Alice E. Adams Charitable Fund, Altman Foundation, Amphion Foundation, Benevity, Aaron Copland Fund for Music, BMI Foundation, BMI, Inc., Charity Navigator's Giving Basket, Cheswatyr Foundation, Edward T. Cone Foundation, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Ford Foundation’s Good Neighbor Committee, Give Lively, Francis B. Goelet Charitable Trust, Fromm Music Foundation, Steven R. Gerber Trust, G. Schirmer/Wise Music Foundation, The Hearst Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Adele and John Gray Endowment Fund, Jephson Educational Trusts, Jerome Foundation, MacMillan Family Foundation, Mellon Foundation, New Music USA’s Organization Fund, The New York Community Trust (Musical Arts Fund, Clara Lewisohn Rossin Trust, and Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund), Pacific Harmony Foundation, Paypal Giving Fund, Rexford Fund, Sphinx Venture Fund, TD Charitable Foundation, Turrell Fund, UKOGF Foundation, Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
Corporate gifts to match employee contributions are made by Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Triton Container International Incorporated of North America, and Neiman Marcus.
Public funds are provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, Office of Brooklyn Borough President Reynoso, and the National Endowment for the Arts.