Gregory W. Yasinitsky, Regents professor and director of the School of Music at Washington State University, is winner of the 2017-18 The American Prize in Composition in the pops/light music division.
Yasinitsky’s composition “Jazz Concerto for Piano and Orchestra” was selected over applications from across the United States. It is a “third stream work which blends classical music and jazz,” he said.
Yasinitsky wrote the concerto for Willis Delony, pianist and professor of jazz studies at Louisiana State University, who premiered it last year with the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Timothy Muffitt. Delony and Muffitt subsequently nominated the work for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music.
The concerto “is a unique work in the American orchestral canon, and most deserving of recognition,” Muffitt said.