Composer Mark Hagerty is this year’s Delaware Division of the Arts Masters Fellow.
In 2024, the Division received work samples from 149 Delaware artists and selected twenty as Fellows, 10 established artists, and nine emerging artists, with one, composer Mark Hagerty, named a Master Fellow.
This highest honor is reserved for those who meet rigorous criteria, and the disciplines are rotated.
Hagerty’s submission included his ongoing collaboration with the urban spoken-word Twin Poets, Delaware’s Poets Laureate.
As Hagerty and the poets prepared an updated version of United We Stand, Hagerty was struck by the power of collaboration. In one session, the ensemble discussed memory "and that led to a poem about a beloved and very much missed, deceased, remembered grandmother, which is something I never would have thought of - something I never would have chosen for myself to write about.”
One of Hagerty’s submissions was a new piece called Woodland, inspired by the return of forests in Israel and confined to wood instruments - including a one-time invention for the composition.
“It really does sound a lot like a tympani but it’s a wooden drum. The reason wooden drums aren’t used that much for this kind of register is we needed a thin piece of wood to be resonant, and it had to be big and it had to be fairly thin, and indeed it did crack. I don’t know how much of a future that instrument has, but it did provide a nice tympani-like sound.”
The fellows’ work is featured in a group exhibition, Award Winners XXIV, currently at the Biggs Museum of American Art, with stops later at CAMP Rehoboth and Cab Calloway School of the Arts.
Delaware Public Media's arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
