Christopher Stark, assistant professor of music in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has been selected for a prestigious fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Stark, a composer of contemporary classical music, is among 173 Guggenheim Fellows chosen in 2017 from an applicant pool of nearly 3,000 scholars, artists and scientists in the United States and Canada. The Guggenheim Fellowship is awarded on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.
“I’m so incredibly grateful for this fellowship,” Stark said, “because it helps to facilitate my principal goal: to make more meaningful and substantial works of art.”
Born and raised in western Montana, Stark creates music that captures the energy and expanse of the American landscape. His Guggenheim Fellowship will support work on a chamber opera inspired by Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era photographs of rural poverty. The libretto, based on Works Progress Administration stories collected during the same period, will be written by his sister, Megan Stark, an associate professor at the University of Montana.
Read more at The Source.
