Eighth Annual Roberta Stephen Award Winners
Winners of the Eighth Annual Roberta Stephen Composition Award Sophie Dupuis (Edmunston, NB) and Robyn Jacob (Vancouver) are this year’s recipients of the Roberta Stephen Composition award.
The Roberta Stephen Award offers support to a Canadian woman composer aged 36 or older for professional development such as further studies, conferences, workshops, or composers’ festivals. Established by the late Calgary composer and publisher Roberta Stephen, the award is administered by the Association of Canadian Women Composers.
As the winners are selected by an international jury, all applicants benefit from having their work assessed by experts in two different countries. This year, the adjudicators enthused over the very high quality of this year’s roster of applicants. Another indication of the musical achievements of Canadian women is that, for the first time in the history of the Roberta Stephen Award, the winners have chosen Canadian women as mentors.
Robyn Jacob (Vancouver, BC) has won numerous awards, including Banff Centre for the Arts Residencies and Canada Council for the Arts Research and Create grants. Her commissions include works for Toronto’s Continuum New Music, Brooklyn’s Percussion, and Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion. Her Roberta Stephen Award funds will go towards studies with composer Anna Hostman during Jacob’s work on her first orchestral commission, tense, tender, tenet, tempus, a seventeen-minute work for the Victoria Symphony Orchestra.
Sophie Dupuis (New Brunswick) holds a DMA from the University of Toronto and is the recipient of many awards, including the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra Future Award and the ECM+ Generation 2018 National Audience Choice Award. Dupuis will use her Roberta Stephen funds to develop vocal skills under the tutelage of alternative vocal techniques specialist Sylvie Martin, as part of her larger project of composing an album of electroacoustic works incorporating her own vocals and violin playing. Her project situates her at the forefront of the long tradition of composer-performers; it also represents her resourcefulness in the face of the challenges of career development outside of a major urban centre.
