The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced that composers David Lang and Alvin Singleton will be among the nine new members inducted during its annual award ceremony to be held in May.
Other new inductees include American visual artists Robert Adams, Ann Hamilton and Bill Jensen--along with American writers Wendell Berry, Ha Jin, Denis Johnson and Tobias Wolff.
Lang currently holds Carnegie Hall's Debs Composer's Chair for 2013-14, and was named Musical America's 2013 Composer of the Year. He received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in music for the little match girl passion.
Lang is co-founder and co-artistic director of the Bang on a Can new music collective in New York. He has been described as a post-minimalist composer, but he employs a variety of disparate elements in his complex works.
Singleton was born in Brooklyn, and has lived and worked in both Europe and the U.S. His latest CD Sing to the Sun was released in February 2007 on Albany Records--their fourth all-Singleton disc.
His recent work, Through It All, was commissioned by the ASCAP Foundation and Spivey Hall, and was premiered by the Grammy-nominated ensemble Imani Winds in 2008.
The Academy also awards honorary membership to select foreign artists. British composer Thomas Adès and Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg will be inducted as Foreign Honorary Members during the ceremony to be held at the academy's New York headquarters in May.
The Academy is an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists and writers. Membership is for life and new members are only inducted when there is a vacancy.
