We are honored to be part of the rich legacy of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University! We join several Bienen alumni as GRAMMY® Award nominees this year.

Nominees for the 62nd annual Grammy Awards include a Bienen School faculty member, eight alumni, and the current winner of the school’s Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition.

For the fourth consecutive year, Donald Nally, director of choral organizations and professor of conducting and ensembles, is a Grammy nominee for best choral performance as conductor of The Crossing. This year he and the group received two nominations in that category—for Voyages (works by Benjamin C. S. Boyle and Robert Convery) and Kile Smith’s The Arc in the Sky. Nally and The Crossing won the best-choral-performance Grammy in both of the previous two years. In addition, their recording of Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth with the New York Philharmonic was nominated for best engineered classical album and best contemporary classical composition. The latter category’s nominees also include the Harp Concerto of 2018 Nemmers Prize winner Jennifer Higdon; that recording was also nominated for best classical instrumental solo.

The all-alumni Third Coast Percussion Ensemble, winner of a 2017 Grammy for best chamber music/small ensemble performance, received its second nomination in that category for Perpetulum. The group’s members are Sean Connors (MM06), Robert Dillon (02), Peter Martin (MM04, DM11), and David Skidmore (05).

The Spektral Quartet, which includes alumni Russell Rolen (DM12) and Doyle Armbrust (MM00), received its fourth Grammy nomination, this time in the category of best world music album, for their recording Fanm d’Ayiti with Nathalie Joachim.

Giancarlo Guerrero (MM92), already a six-time Grammy winner, received his ninth nomination as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. Their album of works by Jonathan Leshnoff was nominated for best classical compendium.

In the best folk album category, Andrew Bird (95) received his first Grammy nomination for My Finest Work Yet.

The 2020 Grammy Awards ceremony will be telecast live on Sunday, January 26.