University of California, San Diego (UCSD) doctoral student Andrew Allen, 24, received a Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) Student Composer Award on May 14 at New York City’s Jumeirah Essex House Hotel. He is one of 11 winners ages 13 to 26 in BMI’s 58th annual awards. The Student Composer Awards recognize superior creative talent and winners receive scholarship grants to be applied toward their musical education. This year, more than 500 manuscripts were submitted. Allen is a UCSD Magellan Scholar and recipient of the Anthony and Carolyn Donato Prize. He received first prize in the 2008 Austin Peay State University Young Composer’s Competition and the 2010 National Association of Composers/USA Young Composers’ Competition, and received an honorable mention in the Frederico Mompou International Awards. Allen’s BMI award-winning work, “Garden of Forking Paths,” is scored for electric guitar, alto sax, marimba and piano, and was commissioned by the Fracas Quartet (Ross Lafleur electric guitar; Andrew Liebermann, sax; Stephanie Titus, piano; and Matt Witten, percussion), which is based in Rochester, N.Y. All are current or former students at the Eastman School. In mid-July the quartet is playing at the Musselman Arts Triathlon, an all-day arts festival presenting musicians, dancers and visual artists in a 12-hour marathon of music. The world premiere of Allen’s work is set for that festival, which is held in Geneva, N.Y. “It’s based on a Jorge Borges short story of the same name,” Allen said. On the title page of the manuscript one finds a labyrinth with positions marked by numbers. “The players explore the harmonic ‘labyrinth’ starting from the center and gradually explore all the possible paths in the garden, sometimes breaking apart from each other to go down their own path for a while,” he said. Allen was born in Pittsburgh but said, “I tell people I’m from Walterboro, S.C., as I spent most of my childhood in South Carolina.” He received his bachelor’s of music from the University of South Carolina and his master’s from Eastman last year. He expects to complete his Ph.D. by 2013. “At some point after qualifying, I would like to live and work in Japan,” he said. Asked what kind of a job other than academe lies in store, Allen replied, “I definitely think there are non-academic avenues for composers (day-jobs as taxi drivers for instance), but I think regardless of where you find work, you need to have a diverse skill set to offer. Lots of very talented people are looking for work right now and the ones that find stable positions are the ones that can do everything in music, regardless of what their main focus is — compose, perform, conduct, teach, improvise, sound engineer, write software, and hopefully know a thing or two about non-western and non-classical music.” Meanwhile, Allen is thrilled with the “great” new music building at the UCSD La Jolla campus, especially Conrad Prebys Concert Hall where he saw red fish blue fish, UCSD’s resident percussion ensemble, a couple weeks ago. “The space is acoustically-perfect for the variety of dramatic and theatrical pieces on that program,” he said. To hear Allen’s award-winning composition, visit his website at www.andrewstewartallen.com