Classical Music News

Composer Lembit Beecher Wins the 2026/26 Rome Prize

April 24, 2025

3 MIN READ

The American Academy in Rome will welcome Estonian-American composer Lembit Beecher while he composes a new work

Administered by the American Academy in Rome, the prize offers a fellowship for those working across the arts, humanities, and sciences — and this year, there were 990 applications for just 35 places. The Estonian-American composer Lembit Beecher has been named as a recipient of the Rome Prize for 2025/26.

As part of his prize, Beecher will spend 5-10 months living on the Academy’s 11-acre grounds, where he will be joined by the other Fellows. He will be afforded funded time to work on his new composition A Book of Falsehoods, a large-scale piece for solo horn and sinfonietta.

Written for horn player Eric Reed and New York City's Ensemble Échappé, the work will be inspired by Beecher's mother, a translator who works between English and Estonian. She has spent the last two decades translating Jaan Kross’s novel Between Three Plagues into English, and the final volume of the set, A Book of Falsehoods, was published in 2022.

Beecher is both a composer and an animator, and his works have often touched on themes of home and displacement. His 2009 documentary oratorio And Then I Remember uses recorded voice to explore the trauma undergone by Estonians during the Second World War, and his song cycle After the Fires is based on conversations with residents of his home town of Bonny Doon about the 2020 CZU Lightning Complex Fires.

These themes are also evident in his large-scale works such as Say Home, a 38-minute piece for the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra that weaves through the musical texture the voices of almost 50 residents of the Twin Cities discussing the meaning of home.

"The Rome Prize is one of the world’s most prestigious fellowship programs and provides the rare opportunity for scholars and artists across a range of sub-fields to collaborate with each other," said Peter N. Miller, President of the American Academy in Rome. "Presented with the opportunity to deeply engage with their work and with that of the other fellows, Rome Prize winners return home with perspectives profoundly enriched by their immersion in an interdisciplinary community set in Rome. The winners form the heart of the Academy, embodying its ethos and extending its international impact through their work now and into the future."

"I will spend my year in Rome writing a piece that draws inspiration from the text of my mother’s translation, including the speech rhythms of Estonian and English, the history of 16th Century Estonia as portrayed in the novel, as well as my mother’s extended and methodical work process," Beecher said of the project. "I am particularly interested in the many layers of emotion and identity that are carried in the nuances of language and translation, especially for people, like my mother, who live multilingually as part of a diaspora, having been displaced from their homelands."