The Gordon Parks Foundation’s Music Fellowship awards one annual $25,000 grant to a musician, composer, sound-based artist, or scholar in the field whose work reflects and extends the legacy of Gordon Parks. The fellowship supports the research, development, or implementation of a new project. The Inaugural Fellowship is awarded to pianist, composer, and performance artist Jason Moran.
Parks began his artistic career as a musician, first as a pianist in a brothel and later as a performer with a traveling jazz band. His first visit to Harlem in 1933, which set the course for his career, was in fact spurred by musical aspirations: He traveled to New York City from Minnesota in March of that year to perform with a band at the Park Central Hotel. As a child, he played piano by ear and, with no formal musical training, he started composing his own piano pieces and devised his own musical notation. Even as he became an accomplished photographer and filmmaker, Parks continued composing music throughout his life. Among his compositions were notable orchestra works and scores for several films. His first major work, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, was performed in Venice in 1952 by the La Fenice Theater Orchestra, led by celebrated conductor Dean Dixon. Parks also composed original scores for several of his own films, including The Learning Tree (1969) and Shaft’s Big Score! (1972), making him one of the few American filmmakers to direct and score their own features. In 1990, he composed the music and libretto for Martin, a ballet honoring the life of Martin Luther King Jr. Following the Venice premiere of Symphonic Set for Piano and Orchestra, Dixon told Time magazine, “We should hear more from Gordon Parks.” Indeed, the world would hear and see much more from Parks in the decades that followed.
In 1942, Parks received the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship to support his career as a photographer. The Fellowship granted the funds to move to Washington, D.C. and apprentice for one year under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration. This opportunity helped to set the course for his sixty-year career that would follow. Today, The Gordon Parks Foundation is dedicated to providing the same vital support to the current and future generation of artists, writers, and musicians following in his footsteps. The Music Fellowship joins the Foundation’s existing Fellowships in art and writing, nurturing the next generation of multidisciplinary artists in the spirit of Parks’s legacy.