AMFS PRESIDENT AND CEO ALAN FLETCHER NAMED AN INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR BY MUSICAL AMERICA

Press Contact:
Jessica Cabe
PR and Publications Associate
jcabe@aspenmusic.org, 970-205-5072

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 9, 2016

AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher named an Innovator of the Year by Musical America

ASPEN, COLORADO—On Monday, Alan Fletcher, Aspen Music Festival and School president and CEO, was honored by Musical America, an international performance arts industry publication, when he was included with only 29 others in “The Innovators: Musical America Professionals of the Year,” an annual publication.

Fletcher was chosen from a pool of hundreds of performing arts professionals nominated by industry peers. The Musical America worldwide audience voted for the top 30 innovators in the industry in 2016, including Fletcher, based on this year’s criterion of, “Great idea! Why didn’t I think of that?”

Fletcher is a champion of 20th century American symphonists and a composer himself, and his teachers included Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone and Paul Lansky. The 2016 AMFS season included a programmatic theme of major symphonic works by American composers like Piston, Korngold, Sessions and others. Fletcher wrote an essay on the importance of celebrating American music for The Guardian called, “Why are the reputations of U.S. composers so pianissimo?” and The Wall Street Journal published an essay by Terry Teachout in July called, “The forgotten moderns: Why aren’t America’s composers as well known as its artists?” which was inspired by the AMFS’s emphasis in 2016 on these composers.

“Call [Fletcher] an innovative excavator,” says “The Innovators.” The publication goes on to quote Fletcher: “…While we all rightly love 20th-century music from abroad, from Stravinsky to Ravel, for some reason we’re in danger of ignoring so much of our own great music, which is to say our own cultural DNA.”

“The Innovators” also mentions Fletcher’s leadership during the AMFS’s $75 million Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum Campus redevelopment, which was completed this year and celebrated with an opening and dedication in July.