Robbins Family Prize in Music Composition awarded to doctoral candidate

Steven Burke, a candidate for the doctor of musical arts degree, has been named the first recipient of the Robbins Family Prize in Music Composition. The $2,500 award, which was inaugurated this year at Cornell, will be awarded annually to a Cornell student who shows exceptional merit and promise as a composer.

Among Burke's other recent honors are a joint commission from the Seattle Symphony and ASCAP, a Presser Foundation Scholarship, the Morton Gould Young Composer Award from ASCAP and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. In March 1998, he was named a finalist for the American Prix de Rome. His Seattle Symphony work, Clockwise, was composed in memory of his principal teacher at Yale, Jacob Druckman. It premiered in Seattle in March under the direction of Gerard Schwarz.

Cornell established one of the first doctoral programs for composers in this country in the early 1940s. Under the guidance of distinguished American composers Robert Palmer and Karel Husa, the program quickly rose to national prominence, producing such luminaries as film and television composer Paul Chihara and symphonic composer Christopher Rouse, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize. The program, now headed by professors Roberto Sierra and Steven Stucky, attracts some of the top composing students from the United States and Europe.

"The establishment of a major composition prize enables us to recognize the superb level of talent among our students and to encourage these emerging artists at precisely that delicate, vulnerable moment when they are launching their professional careers," Stucky said. "I am delighted that we were able to honor Steve Burke as the first winner. He is a major talent who I am sure will make his mark on the American musical scene. We are very proud of him."

The Robbins Family Prize was proposed and funded by Peter and Jody Robbins of Westport, Conn. Robbins, a 1974 Cornell graduate who also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, is general partner of Riverland and Indian Sun, L.C., the leading supplier of oranges to Tropicana. The Robbins family is also a major donor to the renovation and expansion of Lincoln Hall, scheduled for completion in the summer of 2000.