The Charles Ives Music Festival Call for Scores 2025 received over 60 entries from composers in the early or emerging stages of their careers for a pieces with a variety of orchestrations including any subset of 2 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos, piano, and harp.
The winner of this year’s Call for Scores is composer Sam Wu with a piece titled Mass Transit for piano quintet. Sam’s piece will be performed during the Charles Ives Music Festival in concert on Saturday, August 9, 2025. The piece will be performed CIMF artist-faculty from leading American orchestras and chamber ensembles including the MET Opera Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Carpe Diem String Quartet. Read about the artists here.
WINNER
Sam Wu’s music “abounds in delicate colours, wisps of sound and sylvan textures” (Gramophone). Many of his works center around extra-musical themes: architecture and urban planning, climate science, and the search for exoplanets that harbor life.
Selected for the American Composers Orchestra’s EarShot readings and the Tasmanian Symphony’s Australian Composers’ School, winner of an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and First Prize at the Washington International Competition, Sam Wu also received Harvard’s Robert Levin Prize and Juilliard’s Palmer Dixon Prize.
Sam’s collaborations span five continents, notably with the orchestras of Philadelphia, New Jersey, Minnesota, Sarasota, Melbourne, Tasmania, Macao, and Shanghai, the New York City Ballet, Sydney International Piano Competition, the Lontano, Parker, Argus, ETHEL, and icarus Quartets, conductors Osmo Vänskä, Marin Alsop, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Dina Gilbert, and Benjamin Northey, violinist Johan Dalene, and sheng virtuoso Wu Wei.
After growing up in Shanghai, Sam received degrees from Harvard, Juilliard, and Rice. He is currently on faculty at Whitman College, as their Visiting Assistant Professor in Theory and Composition.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Jacob Beranek – Suite for Cello and Harp
Javier Gramajo – “Tema con Variazioni” from Quartetto per Archi No. 1