Associate Professor of Composition Fang Man received the Outstanding Composer Charles Ives Fellowships and Scholarships Award from the February 2024 American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Awards.

This award recognizes Fang Man’s exceptional talent and contributions to the field of music, highlighting the significance of her work.

The Charles Ives Fellowship is named after Charles Ives, a highly influential American composer known for his innovative approach to music. It is a prestigious award granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

These annual prizes, of $15,000 each, are awarded to two young professional composers of extraordinary gifts. The fellowship enables recipients to dedicate more time and resources to their creative work without financial constraints.

It is a significant honor for me, as I have admired the music and aesthetics of esteemed composer Charles Ives for decades, which have had a transformative impact on my music and artistry.

—  Fang Man, Associate Professor of Composition 

She says this financial backing will be instrumental in facilitating large-scale projects she has been pursuing.

“Collaborating with Dr. Jie Guo, a professor in USC’s comparative literature department, ‘Plum in the Golden Vase’ is a trilogy of operas inspired by the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. Challenging traditional Chinese novels’ tendency to depict strong women in a negative light, the trilogy features three distinct female characters, and our retelling of the story deliberately modernizes the images of these women while highlighting the rich texture of their backstories,” says Man.