Clockwise from top left: Olivia Bennett, Gwanyu Cao, Ben Rouder, Ed Frazier Davis

The Mizzou New Music Initiative (MNMI) has announced the selection of four winners in the 2019 Missouri Composers Project (MOCOP) competition.

Now in its eighth year, MOCOP is a collaborative effort involving MNMI, the Columbia Civic Orchestra (CCO), the Columbia Chamber Choir, and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. Composers from all over Missouri are invited each year to submit orchestral and choral works for potential performance, with winners selected in two age categories, “open” and “high school.”

All four winners of the 2019 competition will receive a $500 honorarium from the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, and the CCO and the Chamber Choir will perform their compositions in a concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 10 at First Baptist Church, 1112 East Broadway in Columbia. Admission to the concert is free and open to the public.

In the “open” categories, this year’s winning orchestral composition is “Social Justice Warrior” by Ben Rouder, and there are two winning choral works, “O Magnum Mysterium” by Ed Frazier Davis and “Swallow (Kazakh Folk Song)” by Guanyu Cao.

Rouder, who’s originally from Columbia, is a sophomore composition major and Sinquefield Scholar at Mizzou. Davis, a Chicago native now living in Kansas City, studied at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, while Cao, who grew up in Wuhan, China, currently is a visiting scholar at UMKC.

The winning orchestral work in the “high school” category for 2019 is “Imagination” by Olivia Bennett, a home-schooled junior from Nixa, MO. Bennett previously won the MOCOP competition for an orchestral work in the “high school” category in 2017, and also is a four-time award winner in Mizzou’s annual Creating Original Music Project (COMP) competition for Missouri students in grades K-12.

The Missouri Composers Project (MOCOP) is a collaborative effort by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, the Mizzou New Music Initiative, the Columbia Civic Orchestra, and the Columbia Chamber Choir to bring attention to new large ensemble works written in the state of Missouri. By identifying composers and providing opportunities for the performance of their work, MOCOP intends to showcase emerging talent of Missouri and share it with the world.

The Columbia Civic Orchestra is a volunteer group located in Columbia, Missouri, dedicated to providing enjoyment for its members and audiences with the presentation and preservation of high-quality symphonic music.

The Columbia Chamber Choir in a subset of the Columbia Chorale, which works to promote choral music of the highest artistic quality and to stimulate a greater community understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of choral music by presenting programs appealing to a wide cross-section of Missouri residents and visitors.