A young Canadian composer and singer now teaching at Memorial University School of Music in St. John's has won the Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship from the American Society of Composers.

Windsor, Ont.-born Kati Agocs won the fellowship by submitting several compositions, including Immutable Dreams, a piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, to the international competition.

Kati Agocs won a fellowship that took her to the Tanglewood Music Center this summer to hear her compositions interpreted by professional musicians.
(Image Services/Memorial University of Newfoundland)

She'll formally accept her prize on Dec. 12 at a ceremony at the Lincoln Center in New York.

Agocs, 32, holds both a doctor of musical arts and a masters degree from New York's Juilliard School and studied for a year in Budapest as a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow.

She performs regularly as a soprano and has written for voice, as well as for chamber ensemble (Apollonia), string trio (All the Ends of the World) and alto saxophone (As Biddeth Thy Tongue ).

As part of her fellowship, she went to the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, an annual summer academy offering intense training for professional musicians.

"I was really honoured to attend and it was extremely valuable for me, because the performances of my music there really represented what I intended to do in the scores in a new way," she said in an interview.

Tanglewood has nurtured many pre-eminent American composers and musicians, among them Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, Zubin Mehta and Charles Dutoit.

"When I wasn't in rehearsals with my own music or with my teachers, I attended symphony orchestra rehearsals near every day, and now I have three orchestral commissions coming up," Agocs said.

Agoc's work has been commissioned for CBC Radio and Canada Council for the Arts, as well as St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Da Capo Chamber Players and PRISM Saxophone Quartet.

She first began teaching at Memorial University in September 2006 on an eight-month appointment before accepting a tenure-track position in May 2007.