The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Music Fellowship awards one annual $25,000 grant to a musician, composer, sound-based artist, or music scholar in the field whose work reflects and extends the legacy of Gordon Parks. The fellowship supports the research, development, or implementation of a new project. The Inaugural Fellowship is awarded to pianist, composer, and performance artist Jason Moran.
The Fellowship in Music pays tribute to the significance of music to Parks’ own career. As a child, Parks played piano by ear and, without formal training, composed his own piano pieces and devised a personal system of musical notation. He began his artistic career as a musician, first as a pianist in a brothel and later with a traveling jazz band. These musical pursuits led to his first visit to Harlem in 1933, a formative moment in his career, when he traveled from Minnesota to New York City to perform at the Park Central Hotel. Parks continued composing music throughout his life, even as he achieved prominence as a photographer and filmmaker
Among his compositions were notable orchestra works and scores for several films. His first major work, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, was performed in Venice in 1952 by the La Fenice Theater Orchestra, led by celebrated conductor Dean Dixon. Parks also composed original scores for several of his own films, including The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), making him one of the few American filmmakers to direct and score their own features. In 1990, he composed the music and libretto for Martin, a ballet honoring the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Following the Venice premiere of Symphonic Set for Piano and Orchestra, Dixon told Time magazine, “We should hear more from Gordon Parks.” Indeed, the world would hear and see much more from Parks in the decades that followed.
In 1942, Parks received the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to support his career as a photographer. The Fellowship granted the funds to move to Washington, D.C. and apprentice for one year under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration. This opportunity helped set the course for the sixty-year career that followed. Today, The Gordon Parks Foundation is dedicated to providing the same vital support to the current and future generation of artists, writers, and musicians following in his footsteps. The Music Fellowship joins the Foundation’s existing Fellowships in art and writing, nurturing the next generation of multidisciplinary artists in the spirit of Parks’s legacy.
Please note: Applications for fellowships are accepted by invitation only.