CCM Composition Professor awarded 2025 Wachtmeister Award
Douglas Knehans is the recipient of the award granted by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts
Story by CCM Graduate Assistant Lucy Evans
The UC College-Conservatory of Music congratulates Professor Douglas Knehans, Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at CCM, who was recently named the recipient of the 2025 Wachtmeister Award. Awarded every two years by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), the prize includes a 30-day residency at Mt. San Angelo in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, as well as a $1,000 honorarium and a travel stipend.
Established to acknowledge “the vital role of the arts in our world, the importance of artists who exemplify excellence in their field, and the necessity of time and space for the creative phase of all artistic work,” the Wachtmeister Award rotates among writers, visual artists and composers. “The committee highlighted the engaging expressiveness of Knehans’s music, its beautiful melodies and harmonies, and his command of musical syntax as key factors in his selection,” reads VCCA’s press release.
Knehans’s residency will be focused on a 20-minute piano concerto entitled Hurricane. Drawing inspiration from the nature, much of Knehans’s work focuses on the natural beauty of the world and the threats it faces in the modern era. Hurricane “is dedicated as a reminder of what we have and a warning of what we may lose,” says Knehans.
Douglas Knehans
Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar, CCM Composition
4232 Emery Hall
Though first known through his collaboration with director Barrie Kosky in the Opera Australia production of his The Ascension of Robert Flau (1990), he is perhaps best known for his orchestral compositions. In this music the study of orchestral mass, expressive impact and sonic brilliance drive his musical language. Additional to Knehans’s eight large works for orchestra, his music has come to the attention of soloists and orchestras through his four symphonies and twelve concertos for instrument or voice and orchestra. Knehans’s orchestral and other compositions, including opera, have been performed worldwide at major music festivals and been included on a number of solo and compilation recordings.
Knehans’s creative work in both orchestral and vocal music as well as chamber music and electro-acoustic music draws on his three major sources of theoretical interest—the study of time and memory; the study of human emotion; and the study of the organic and natural world. These elements can—and again through the use of time, memory and emotion— easily be drawn into a deeper and more crypto-spiritual world of the psycho-emotional by utilizing organic and natural world metaphors for our deeper human existence and struggles.
His music is influenced by his Australian-American training which was focused primarily on European music in his Australian undergraduate study at the prestigious Australian National University, and then American music in his American study at Queens College with Thea Musgrave—again also underscoring the European roots of his voice— and then at Yale with Pulitzer prize winning composer Jacob Druckman.
After completing all of his study at ANU, Queens and Yale, Knehans held a professorship at the University of Alabama; was Director and Head of School at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music in Australia and then was appointed the Dean of the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at CCM.
About CCM Composition
The Composition program at CCM offers undergraduate and graduate degrees with a focus in providing students with the necessary training to successfully compose original music in acoustic or electro-acoustic mediums.
Core courses in the Composition major include private lessons, orchestration, counterpoint, introductory to advanced courses in electronic music, professional aspects of a composition career and changing special topics courses. The composition symposium is a forum for guest and departmental presentations.
In these courses and additional courses in other CCM departments, students in CCM’s Composition program study the various analytical and compositional procedures of music and gain knowledge of past musical styles as well as music of other cultures.
CCM's composition programs not only benefit composition majors, but also serve as a resource for all music students, enriching the already active musical atmosphere of the college. The prestigious Alexander Zemlinsky Prize for Composition also acts as a further resource for the conservatory, engaging international jury members and award recipients in the commissioning and performance of chamber and orchestral work at CCM.
The CCM Center for Computer Music contains studios/laboratories for computer music composition, research and performance equipped for exploring programming, interactive performance, virtual reality, internet performance and multimedia and multi-channel composition.
Lucy Evans
CCM Graduate Assistant, Marketing + Communications
Lucy Evans is an artist diploma student studying Opera-Vocal Performance at CCM. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, and has performed as a young artist with the Santa Fe Opera and Opera Theatre of St Louis.
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