Brusa Foundation Award Announces 2024 Winner

Composer Güray Kapucu is the inaugural winner of the award with £5,000 for exceptional symphonic works

The Brusa Foundation Award is open annually to composers of all nationalities, over the age of 18 and under the age of 30.

For its first edition, the Brusa Foundation Committee received over 85 scores from 35 countries. This year’s inaugural winner is the Turkish composer Güray Kapucu for his work Bird in a Cage. 

“We found his work fresh, inspired, fluid, colorful, rhythmically complex but always natural,” reads the press release. “A musical journey full of fantasy and a joy to listen to. We would also like to highlight how much we were impressed by the composer’s freedom of thought.”

Born in 2000, Kapucu earned the first place to enter the Işılay Saygın Fine Arts High School in 2014. In 2018, he was accepted to the Composition and Orchestra Conducting faculty of the Dokuz Eylül University State Conservatory, under the guidance of Aysim Dolgun Ildiz. 

He graduated in 2023 having also studied Harmony, Counterpoint and Fugue, Orchestra Conducting, Score Reading and Performance, and Musical Analysis and New Music Techniques. Kapucu has since begun his composition master's degree at Dokuz Eylül University Institute of Fine Arts.

His winning work, Bird in a Cage, can be heard here.

“The quality of many of the submissions was very high, and we were extremely happy to discover so many talented composers,” the press release added. “For this reason, we felt it necessary to publish the names and works of certain candidates whose compositions we felt were also of merit.”

The award’s Honorable Mentions went to:

• Zhiyang Zhang (b.1998) | China | for Chasing the Moon
• Tomos Owen Jones (b.1996) | Wales, UK | for Flow – Journey of a River
• Tok Jun Hui (b.200) | Singapore | for One Room of Happiness
• Gianluca Piombo (b.1995) | Italy | for Variazioni Sinfoniche
• Jihang Dai (b.2000) | China | for Scherzo 
• Michael Phillips (b.1993) | UK | for Cradle

The award is named for the award-winning Italian-British composer Elisabetta Olga Laura Brusa, who is currently best known for her orchestral works recorded in five volumes on the Naxos Records label. Her music has also been broadcast and televised across Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam.