UC San Diego Graduate Students in Music Honored for Compositions

Two UC San Diego graduate students in music have received honors for their compositions that will take them abroad.

Anthony Vine, a Ph.D candidate at UCSD, won the Rome Prize in musical composition, while S Whiteley received a commission from Riot Ensemble, a London-based collective of contemporary solo artists.

Vine, a teaching artist at the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School in New York City, is a Brooklyn-based composer and guitarist who also has collaborated with the La Jolla Symphony.

The fellowships, from the American Academy in Rome, support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. They were awarded to 36 American artists and scholars who each will receive a stipend, workspace and room and board at the Academy’s 11-acre campus on the Janiculum Hill in Rome.

The fellowships begin in September.

“This class of Rome Prize winners once again includes some of America’s most gifted scholars and artists,” said Mark Robbins, the academy’s president and CEO. “Their fellowship experience, living and working in a multidisciplinary community in Rome, has an enduring impact individually and on the wider intellectual and cultural sphere.”

Whiteley’s work was selected to be performed as part of a Riot Ensemble fall concert at the University of Liverpool. The show will mark the centennial of British composer Madeleine Dring’s birth.

The San Diego-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and experimental media artist works primarily with electronics and intermedia and has held residencies at the I-Park Inc. Foundation, Dublin Sound Lab and the Labo de Musique Contemporaine de Montréal.