Anna Jacobs : Associate Artist
Photo: Luke Redmond
Anna Jacobs (b.1980) is a Sydney–born composer/lyricist/arranger who resides in New York. She is currently undertaking a Masters in Musical Theatre Writing at New York University, and working as a Teaching Artist for the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
Jacobs’s works have been commissioned and performed by the Australian Youth Orchestra and Theatre of Image, the US National Lutheran Choir, the Sydneian Bach Choir, Coro Innominata, and school musicians from Ascham, Sydney Grammar, PLC Croydon, and ANATS NSW. Jacobs is the recipient of a Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Scholarship, a 2006 Helpmann Award (Best Children’s Presentation for Stella and the Moon Man), First Prize in the 2005 US National Lutheran Choir Composition Contest (for Ave Maria), a Sydney Moss Scholarship, the Sarah Theresa Makinson Prize for Musical Composition, the Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize (for Growing Up), and a 2004 Residency at the Bundanon Artists Centre. She is also published by MorningStar Music Publishers.
From 2005–06, Jacobs studied composition under Sven–David Sandström at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. In 2002, she graduated with Bachelor of Music degree and First Class Honours from the University of Sydney, where she majored composition under Anne Boyd, John Peterson, and Nicholas Routley.
Jacobs is especially passionate about vocal and theatre music. Currently, she is collaborating with bookwriter/lyricist Maggie–Kate Coleman on a full–length musical, which will have its first New York City reading in April 2008. Jacobs and Coleman recently completed Stepmommy Dearest, a song cycle for mezzo–soprano Jamie Barton (winner of the 2007 Metropolitan Opera Awards), to be premiered in August 2007 at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Massachusetts. Also coming up in December 2007, Sydney–based choir Coro Innominata will premiere their second commissioned work from Jacobs, an a cappella setting of two poems by E.E. Cummings, entitled As Is The Sea Marvelous.
Jacobs attributes her love of music to her parents, Jenny and David.
Biography provided by the composer — current to August 2007