And The Winners Are...

ASCAP (American Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) has formally announced the winners of its 39th annual Deems Taylor Awards. As promised earlier, when I learned that Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond is a winner, here is the alphabetical list of authors and publishers to be honored at the December 7 ceremony at Lincoln Center in New York City.

· Julia Blackburn for With Billie, published by Pantheon Books
· Anna Marie Busse Berger for Medieval Music and the Art of Memory, published by University of California Press
· Jeff Chang for Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hip Generation, published by St. Martin's Press/Picador
· Boris Gasparov for Five Operas and a Symphony, published by Yale University Press
· Kenneth Morgan for Fritz Reiner: Maestro and Martinet, published by University of Illinois Press
· Tom Piazza for Understanding Jazz: Ways to Listen, published by Random House
· Michael V. Pisani for Imagining Native America in Music, published by Yale University Press
· Doug Ramsey for Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, published by Parkside Publications
· George Rochberg for The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer's View of Twentieth-Century Music, published by University of Michigan Press

Deems Taylor (1885-1966) was a composer and music critic. He wrote suites, notably Through The Looking Glass and The Chambered Nautilus, and a number of other orchestral works. Two of his operas, The King's Henchman and Peter Ibbetson, were commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera Company. An influential figure in American culture for more than three decades, he was ASCAP's president for six years. Taylor was an intimate of the group of writers, actors and critics known as the Algonquin Round Table. The Algonquin group of literary tastemakers of the 1920s included Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Alexander Wolcott and Dorothy Parker.

For a complete list of the 2006 Deems Taylor Award winners in all fields, click here to go to the ASCAP announcement.