This time next year, Distinguished Artist Professor Marilyn Shrude will likely not be thinking of class schedules or her duties as chair of the musicology/composition/theory department. Instead, thanks to support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, she expects to be deeply immersed in writing music.

Shrude has been named a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. Designed to help nurture scholarship or creative activity, the prestigious awards are “intended for scholars or artists who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts,” according to the foundation.

Shrude personifies that description. Her compositions have been performed across the United States, in Europe and in Asia, and she has been a guest artist at festivals around the world. Nearly 20 of her compositions have been recorded on various labels.

Guggenheim Fellows are chosen through a rigorous and highly competitive application process that this year yielded 180 fellowships from about 3,000 applications.

Only about 10 fellows were chosen in the music composition category — not all in academia, and about half in jazz. Shrude’s fellow winners include composers from Juilliard, Harvard and New York University. “It’s nice to have Bowling Green State University represented among institutions like these,” she said.

The “planets aligned” for Shrude this time, she said. She had already planned to take a faculty improvement leave next year to write two commissioned compositions. Being free of administrative and teaching duties “is a different mode of operation,” she said. “It lets my imaginative side come out.”

For more information you can read this article, published by the American Composers Alliance.

(Submitted by Susan Knapp)