Tyler Goodrich White, professor of composition and conducting and director of orchestras in the Glenn Korff School of Music, has won two silver medals at this year’s Global Music Awards, for composer and original score for “The Four Elements.”
“I’m delighted to receive this honor in two separate categories,” White said. “The Global Music Awards place the world of contemporary classical music squarely within the wide and dizzying range of today’s musical styles and genres. As such, the Global Music Awards give composers of classical music the relevance and recognition they deserve through their work day in and day out.”
Established in 2011 by Dr. Thomas Eugene Baker, the Global Music Awards is a well-known international music competition that celebrates independent musicians. They are recognized as music’s “golden seal of approval” and receive hundreds of entries from around the world each year.
“The Four Elements (Chamber Symphony No. 2)” by White includes four movements: Earth (Intrada Fantasy), Water Waltz, Air—An Elegy, and Fire Finale.
This summer, Parma Recordings released “Symphonic Chronicles Vol. III” on their Grammy-winning label Navona Records, which included the recording of White’s string orchestra work, “The Four Elements (Chamber Symphony No. 2),” performed by the Brno Contemporary Orchestra (Czech Republic) and conducted by Pavel Snajdr. It is available on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
“They did a wonderful job,” White said of the orchestra’s performance of his work. “It’s really wonderful to see the places where that sort of Slavic, Eastern European soul comes out where they took a certain sort of leisurely amount of time in some passages, which really enhances the expression really beautifully.”
White has been at Nebraska since 1994 and has led the orchestra program in a period of growth and achievement. A protégé of the late Maestro Robert Shaw, White graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in composition from Cornell University.
National and international recognition for his compositions has come through awards from ASCAP, BMI, The American Prize, The American Conservatory at Fontainebleau (Prix Maurice Ravel), Vienna Modern Masters, the Omaha Symphony Guild, and more. In 2014, White won a silver medal in composition from the Global Music Awards for his opera “O Pioneers!”.
For more information on “The Four Elements” or links to stream/buy the CD, visit https://go.unl.edu/fourelements.