2024-25 Composition Competition

Get to know the faces and pieces of our 2024-25 Composition Competition. After a competitive year with over 80 submissions, we couldn't be happier to introduce our winners! 

WinnerS

"Where Does Your Body End" by Ben Matney

Ben Matney is a composer and songwriter who has worked across a wide range of genres and stylistic mediums. His music is characterized by its immersive quality, relishing evocative texture and beveled dissonance as well as melodic lyricism.

Matney’s work has been performed by renowned ensembles such as earspace, Red Pine Wind Quintet, Sounding Board, Khemia, and the Raleigh Symphony Orchestra. He has also written as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians. Matney is based in Raleigh, NC.

Read our Q&A with Ben here.

"Go Down, Death" by David Das

David Das is a Grammy-nominated composer and music producer based in Los Angeles. His experience covers the range from feature films, TV shows, cartoons, commercials, trailers, and other media work, over to modern music production, choral and orchestral writing/arranging, and more. He has worked on projects for Lionsgate, Fox, Disney, DirecTV, Dreamworks, Fremantle, Intel, BBDO, HBO, PBS, TLC, Telemundo, Weight Watchers, Coca Cola, Hal Leonard, and many others.

He has composed music for dozens of TV shows, scored films (such as Lionsgate’s feature thriller The Appearing and the human trafficking drama Trafficked), worked on music teams (Jordan Peele's US, HBO's Allen v. Farrow, both with composer Michael Abels), and written and produced songs for numerous pop, rock, R&B, soul, and musical theatre artists (including Aaron Lazar's star-studded Impossible Dream). He serves as Vice President of the Society of Composers & Lyricists and Past President of the Academy of Scoring Arts.

Read our Q&A with David here.