FOR YOUR GRAMMY® Consideration
a joiful yule
ARTIST: BEDLAM
“The magical duo BEDLAM” (Fanfare Magazine) brings their unique and exciting approach to music-making in their third album, a joiful yule. From the contemplative and ethereal to the jubilant and bawdy, this Christmas album is meant for a cold winter’s night by a warm fire. Bringing together traditional songs, folk melodies, and original compositions, BEDLAM revels in performing some of their favorite music for the holiday season.
Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
Best Engineer, Classical Paul Sánchez
CROSSING
ARTIST: BORDERLANDS ENSEMBLE
On their sophomore release CROSSING, the Borderlands Ensemble invites listeners into a musical landscape shaped by memory, place, and shared experience. Moving between introspective lyricism and expansive, cinematic gesture, the album blends strings, guitar, and the distinctive voice of the French horn to tell stories rooted in the desert. Featuring new works by Barbara White, Jorge Sosa, Nubia Jaime-Donjuan, Edwin Guevara-Gutiérrez, and Michael Leibowitz, plus three new arrangements of classic Mexican canciones, CROSSING offers an authentic and deeply felt journey from the borderlands of the American Southwest.
Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
Best Contemporary Classical Composition
MUSIC FOR A BEAUTIFUL PLACE
ARTIST: Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, ft. Nick Photinos and Andy Hudson
For the past ten years, composer Bill Ryan and his acclaimed GVSU New Music Ensemble have traveled the country, performing outdoors in some of the most stunning and cherished landscapes in the United States. Music for a Beautiful Place is a new concert-length experience inspired by these travels. The music is a slowly shifting landscape of sound that evokes these and other locations. It is an 82-minute gentle-ambient journey that invites listeners to slow down, listen, and reflect on the music, the space around them, others, and themselves. This music enhances any setting surrounding the listener, enabling them to experience it in a new light and deepen their appreciation for it.
Best New Age, Ambient, or Chant Album
Best Instrumental Composition
Bill Ryan: Music for a Beautiful Place
POLYPTYCH: EMOVERE
ARTIST: Camilla Caldwell
Polyptych: Emovere is a deeply personal exploration by composer and violinist Camilla Caldwell, delving into her neurodivergent emotional experience through multi-tracked electro-acoustic and acoustic violin. Employing extended techniques and electronics, Caldwell crafts five interconnected sound-movement pieces that together form a polyptych, each illuminating the invisible threads of human connection. Designed as a sensorial and immersive listening experience, the music emerges from Caldwell’s own emotional landscape, listeners are encouraged to discover their own meaning and resonance within each piece.
Best Classical Instrumental Solo
Best Arrangement, Instrumental Or A Cappella
The Sound of Space Between Us (Annie Nikunen, arr. Camilla Caldwell)
Contemporary Classical Composition Heart Unheard