F. Jane Naylor wins national award
New prize honours women’s voices
P.E.I. composer F. Jane Naylor has won the first Lirit New Composition Award.
This significant new award, supported by the Judy Dan Fund for Arts and Education, will be given annually by the Lirit Women’s Chamber Choir to a Canadian composer for an unpublished work for women’s voices.
Naylor’s winning composition, “After Mountains”, was chosen from among submissions by Canadian composers from across the country and abroad.
The work is a dramatic choral setting of a poem by the late Joseph H. Sherman (O.C.), who resided in P.E.I. from 1979 to 2006. It is notable for its feminine sensibility, its contrasting vocal sections, and its rich harmonic language.
Naylor will receive $1,500 and the piece will be premiered by the Lirit Women’s Chamber Choir, a Toronto-based group of experienced choral singers, in the spring of 2019.
Naylor is an associate composer with the Canadian Music Centre, and a member of PEIRMTA, CFMTA, and SOCAN. Her works have been commissioned by eklektikos, with funding from SOCAN, and commissioned and broadcast by the CBC.
She has also received grants from the Prince Edward Island Council of the Arts. At 70, her first piece for orchestra was requested and premiered by the P.E.I. Symphony Orchestra. Seven hundred people gave it a standing ovation, and Naylor was nominated for a Music P.E.I. Award.
Naylor has been a sessional lecturer in the UPEI Department of music and continues to teach piano and theory privately.