Congratulations to the winners

The awards ceremony for the Sibelius Student Composer of the Year competition was held on 12 February at the Royal Academy of Music, London, and was packed full of live music, inspirational speeches and recognition for fantastic young composing talent.

The event was attended by all of the winners and five of the six runners up, as well as star judges David Arnold, Howard Goodall, Michael Price, Django Bates and Lord Puttnam.

All winners and runners up with judges David Arnold, Django Bates, Michael Price, Howard Goodall and Lord Puttnam
(with ‘Exceptional Promise’ winner Christopher Bowman front-centre)

The winners in the Film genre had their pieces screened to the audience and the Jazz and Classical/Contemporary winners’ compositions were performed live by students from the Royal Academy. Classical/Contemporary 17-18 winner Thomas Chevis said, “The experience of winning, hearing my work performed by Royal Academy singers and being at the Awards Ceremony has blown me away.”

And he wasn’t the only one blown away. Howard Goodall said, “The standard has been extremely high and I want to congratulate everyone. I have some advice for the winners and runners up. Try everything, keep working, always work from what is there.”

Alison Kerr, the driving force from Sibelius/Avid behind the competition, used the event to announce that the 2009 student composing competition would also be open to students in the United States, Germany and Japan, and would add three new categories in addition to the existing three: Songwriting, Video Production, and Video Editing.