Local Composer Receives BMI Student Award
Local Composer Receives BMI Student Award
Steve Danyew, 2002 graduate of Newtown High School, received the BMI Student Composer Award on May 22 at a reception held at the Jumeriah Essex House Hotel in New York City. Steve was one of ten winners.
The BMI Foundation, Inc recognizes superior creative talent in young people ages 17 to 26 and awards scholarship grants that are to be applied to the recipientsâ music education. This year, more than 400 manuscripts were submitted from throughout the Western Hemisphere. All works are judged under pseudonyms. Cash awards totaled $20,000.
To date, BMI has awarded 503 scholarship grants. Many of todayâs most prominent classical composers received their first recognition from the BMI Student Composer Awards. Eleven former winners have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music.
Mr Danyew recently received his bachelor of music in music theory and composition form the Frost School of Music, University of Miami. He earned a 4.0 GPA and was named the Outstanding Graduate for both the Department of Theory and Composition and the Beta Beta Chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honors Society at the Frost School.
In February 2006, his orchestral work, The Night Eagle, was premiered by the Frost Symphony Orchestra in Miami after it was named the winner of the Frost Symphony Orchestra Composition Competition. The work then was named a winner of the BMI Student Composer Award.
Mr Danyew served as president of the University of Miami Society of Composers for two years. In 2005, he founded the Youth Music Campaign, a student organization dedicated to fostering musical opportunities for underprivileged youth in Miami.
He is a member of Pi Kappa Lambda, the Golden Key International Honour Society, the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society, and has been named a Bertha Foster Scholar, a Weeks Scholar, and a Lawrence Friedman Scholar.
He has received awards from the All American Music Festival, BMI, University of Miami, Festivals of Music Inc, and the GWCC Chamber Music Competition, among others. He was recently selected from a national pool of composers to serve as a fellow at the Composers Conference at Wellesley, held in late July. He is presently composing a new chamber work to be premiered at the conference.