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Motifs: May 2022

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Delta David Gier (IAC/NMC 77), conductor of the South Dakota Symphony, has been awarded the 2022 Ditson Conductor's Award. Established in 1945 as part of the Alice M. Ditson Fund, the prestigious award honors conductors who have a distinguished record of championing contemporary American music. Gier joins a distinguished list of past winners with deep Interlochen connections, including Howard Hanson, Thor Johnson, Frederic Fennell, Eugene Ormandy, and JoAnn Falletta.

Melanne Mueller (IAC/NMC 81-82, IAA 82-83, IAC St 84), founder and CEO of Avie Records, recently worked with the New York Youth Symphony on their debut recording, released on April 8. The self-titled album features four works by three African-American women composers, Florence Price, Valerie Coleman, and Jessie Montgomery, and debuted at Number 2 on Billboard's Classical Chart. The album, recorded during the height of the COVID pandemic lockdown using a socially-distanced approach, brought young musicians together during a time of separation.

Jazz flugelhornist Dmitri Matheny (IAA 83-84) will release CASCADIA, a new album by the Dmitri Matheny Group on the Origin Records label on June 17. The album showcases timeless classics and original jazz from the Pacific Northwest and is available for streaming. All About Jazz has called the group "an all-star jazz band featuring some of the most accomplished musicians in the western United States". Over his 30-year career, Matheney's discography includes 120 albums on which he appears as a composer, arranger, producer, annotator, or flugelhorn soloist.

Jonathan Bailey Holland (IAC/NMC 89, IAA 88-92, IAC St 92) will join Carnegie Mellon University as the Jack G. Buncher Chair and new head of the School of Music beginning Aug. 1, 2022. Most recently, Holland served as chair of composition, contemporary music, and core studies at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, a position he has held since 2016 in addition to serving as professor of composition. As a composer, Holland's works have been performed and commissioned by numerous organizations, both nationally and internationally, including the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Dallas Symphony and Dallas Black Dance Theater, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the National Symphony, the Baltimore Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, among others.

Addy Sterrett (IAA 10-12) was announced as the Grand Rapids Symphony's Linn Maxwell Keller Distinguished Bach Musician award winner. The Keller Award was created in 2016 in memory of the famed mezzo-soprano. Sterrett is a graduate of Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music, where she studied Early Music Voice Performance. She was chosen from a group of five solo finalists who competed on April 21 at the 2022 Grand Rapids Bach Festival. In addition to the opportunity to be the featured artist in a performance with the Grand Rapids Symphony, Sterrett received a $10,000 cash prize to help further her music career.

Lanie Altmiller (IAC 17-18, IAA 18-19, IAC St 21-22) will release her first EP titled Lightweight on all streaming platforms on May 27, 2022. This follows the release of her first single by the same name on April 29. Music videos are expected in the summer of 2022. Altmiller is a folk-pop singer-songwriter studying Commercial Music with a focus in Voice at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.