2025 COMPOSITION CONTEST

WINNER: Paul Novak, impossible inventions

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble is thrilled to perform impossible inventions during our 2026-27 season.

The "spellbinding" (Washington Post) music of Chicago-based composer Paul Novak immerses listeners in shimmering and subtly crafted musical worlds full of color, motion, light, and magic. His recent projects engage with dreams and memory, queer identity, climate change and the natural world, and psychosomatic illness.

Novak's 25/26 season includes premieres and performances by Orchestra of St. Luke's, International Contemporary Ensemble, Chicago Composers Orchestra, the Balourdet, JACK, Formosa, and Varo Quartets, ZOFO, Blackbox Ensemble, and more. His other recent collaborators include American Composers Orchestra, Reno Philharmonic, Austin Symphony, Chicago Civic Orchestra, Music from Copland House, DanceWorks Chicago, Sandbox Percussion, Ekmeles, Quince Ensemble, Decoda, and Left Coast Ensemble. His music has been heard at Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, New World Center, and Chicago's Symphony Center.

Novak has received a Barlow Commission and an Underwood Commission, as well as awards from the ASCAP, BMI, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Red Note, League of Composers, and more. He has received fellowships from Aspen, Norfolk, Copland House, Millay, and I-Park, and was featured in the Washington Post's "23 for '23: Composers and Performers to Watch this Year," where he was praised for his "impressive range and restless energy" in a catalog spanning "lithe, elastic vocal pieces...vibrant orchestral works...and evocative etudes for string quartet."

Novak is the co-artistic director and flutist of Chicago-based ensemble Mycelium New Music, which launches its debut season in 2024. Originally from Reno, NV, he is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. www.paulnovakmusic.com/

Honorable MentionS:

Balázs Horváth
Charleston for Rozsda

Balázs Horváth composer of symphonic, ensemble and chamber music has recently been interested in the combination possibilities of popular and serious music and integrating theatrical elements into music. Noises and musical sounds often alternate in his compositions.

He was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1976. He studied composition at the Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest with Zoltán Jeney. He received his doctorate degree (DLA) in composition at the same Academy in 2005, while teaching there as a senior lecturer. At the moment Horváth is assistant professor of composition and music theory at the Liszt Academy.

Horváth’s compositions are performed at international music events such as the Budapest Spring Festival, Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam), ISCM World Music Days (Ljubljana, Göteborg, Zagreb, Tongyeong), Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Music in Current (Tokyo), musikprotokoll (Graz), cresc. Biennale für Neue Musik (Frankfurt), the Transparent Sound New Music Festival (Budapest), the Taiwan International Music Festival (Taipei) etc. Horváth won prizes at composition competitions. He received 1st Prize for POLY at the ‘In Memoriam György Ligeti’ composition competition in Berlin (2007) and 1st and 2nd prizes at different categories of the 2nd New Hungarian Music Forum, Budapest (2009, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2020).

He was awarded twice the Benedek Istvánffy-Prize (2004, 2007) and also got the Ferenc Erkel-Prize in 2007. He worked with reknown conductors and ensembles such as Péter Eötvös, Gregory Vajda, Pierre-André Valade, Amadinda Percussion Group, Ensemble Modern, Göteborg Symfoniker, Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Sinfonietta, RSO Wien, Ensemble UMZE, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, New Juilliard Ensemble. Horváth was founder and artistic leader of THReNSeMBLe that performed contemporary music between 2008-2019. The ensemble united with Ensemble UMZE in 2019. Since that year Horváth is chair of UMZE Association. At the same time he is board member of Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation and he often teaches at the workshops of the Foundation. He became member of Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2024. Horváth is founder and co-curator of Transparent Sound New Music Festival in Budapest.

Sami Seif
Ode Phénicienne

Lebanese composer and music theorist Sami Seif (b. 1998) has been praised as “a distinctive compositional voice” who creates “intoxicating and fascinating soundworld[s]” (Carla Rees, Pan Journal of the British Flute Society). Described as “very tasteful and flavorful” with “beautiful, sensitive writing!” (Webster University Young Composers Competition), his music is inspired by the aesthetics, philosophies, paradigms and poetry of his Middle-Eastern heritage. His latest musical concerns center around the phenomenology of time and of differing degrees of focus.

An enthusiastic collaborator, Seif has worked with numerous renowned musicians. Previous and upcoming collaborators include Mary Kay Fink and Stanley Konopka of The Cleveland Orchestra, Carla Rees, Josh Modney, ETHEL, Vinay Parameswaran, Marcelo Lehninger, the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, TAK Ensemble, Earplay, the Odin Quartet, TEMPO Ensemble, Ensemble 126, Ensemble Metamorphosis, Juan Riveros, Drew Hosler, and Dustin White, among others. Seif’s music has been recognized internationally by various institutions such as ASCAP, SOCAN, the Society for New Music, the RED NOTE New Music Festival, the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of New York, the New York Composers Circle, the Stamford Music and Arts Academy, the Foundation for Modern Music, the Ohio Federation of Music Clubs, the Cleveland Composer’s Guild, among others. Additionally, he was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra call for scores from a pool of more than 2200 applicants from more than 90 countries. In 2020, he was selected again from a larger pool of almost 8000 applicants.

Originally from the small town of Ashkout in Mount Lebanon, he was born to a non- musical family in Abu Dhabi and he is fluent in Arabic, French and English. He started out at the age of twelve as a self-taught musician, composing and playing on microtonal keyboards, specially designed for Arabic music. Not having had access to formal music education, Seif taught himself how to read and write music by reading theory textbooks. He later formally studied piano, composition, audio engineering, and sound synthesis. Seif completed his undergraduate studies in composition and music theory at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where, he was honored with the Donald Erb prize in composition and the Beth Pearce Nelson award in music theory upon graduation. He is currently a doctoral fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Past winners:

2024 Artur Akshelyan, Sillage
- Honorable Mention: Eduardo Soutullo, Funeral Music for Black Victims
2023 Gilad Cohen A Dark Matter
- Honorable Mention: Paul Novak entwining
2022 Tomàs Peire-Serrate Five Haiku
- Second Place: Daniel Sabzghabaei At any rate II. باقی مانده "what remains”
- Honorable Mentions:
  Paul Novak a string quartet is like a flock of birds
  Aaron Levin Snow Fragments
2020 Sarah Westwood's Things You Don’t Yet Know You Feel
- Honorable Mention:
  Felipe Tovar-Henao: ...de lo voluble...
2019 Sarah Gibson: I prefer living in color
- Honorable Mentions:
  Luk Wai Chun Vincent: Bian lian
  Pascal Le Boeuf: Imp in impulse
2018 Charles Peck: Sunburst [video]
- Honorable Mentions:
  Jack Frerer: Downloads
  Daniel Harrison: Give Up the Ghost
  Stephen Yip: Luminosity Etude
2017 Chiayu Hsu: Rhapsody Toccata [video]
2016 Melody Eötvös: House of the Beehives [video]
2015 Christopher Stark: Piano Quartet 2014 [video]
2014 Felix Leuschner: Krieg ohne Schlacht [video]
2013 Michael-Thomas Foumai: Scat
2012 Ryan Carter: too many arguments in line 17
2011 Mike Solomon: Anonymous Student Compliment or Complaint
2010 Steven Snowden
2009 Matthew Barnson: String Quartet
2008 Stephen Feigenbaum: Boiling Point for string quartet
2007 Moritz Eggert
2006 Carl Schimmel
2005 Justin Merritt
2004 Claude Baker
2003 Bruno Ruviaro
2002 Tamar Muskal
2001 Gabriel Vine
2000 Yehuda Yannay

photo credit (strings): Jeanette Yu