CCM Composition Professor awarded 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship

UC College-Conservatory of Music Composition Professor Mara Helmuth, DMA, was recently appointed to the 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows, including 198 distinguished individuals working across 53 disciplines. The Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the 2025 Fellows on April 15; read the announcement. 

Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 3,500 applicants, the Class of 2025 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped based on both prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each Fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” The 100th class of Fellows is part of the Guggenheim Foundation’s yearlong celebration marking a century of transformative impact on American intellectual and cultural life. 

“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers, and artists,” said Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”

Helmuth's compositions have received numerous performances in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. She has also participated in research involving virtural reality, granular synthesis, object-oriented and graphical user interface programming, Internet 2 performance applications and wireless sensor networks for musical performance.

She has created the composition applications StochGran and Patchmix, and the internet improvisation application Soundmesh. Her articles concerning computer and electronic music have appeared in the Journal for New Music Research, Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal and Computers and Mathematics with Applications. She has also written chapters in the monographs Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music (Simoni, ed.) and Audible Traces (Barkin and Hamessley, ed.).

Helmuth has received grants from UC's University Research Council, the Tangeman Sacred Music Center, Open Meadows Foundation, the Brazos Valley Arts Council and Texas A&M's Associate Provost for Computing. She has also been on the board of directors of the International Computer Music Association and Society of Electroacoustic Music in the United States, and served as ICMA President.

Helmuth isn't the only CCM Composition professor to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2017, Professor Emeritus Joel Hoffman was named a Fellow after he retired from CCM in 2014. Two other UC professors have also received Guggenheim Fellowships: College of Arts and Sciences Professor Myriam Chancy in 2014 and College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning Professor Frank Herrmann in 2006. 

In 2023, UC launched a presidential investment to support the university’s humanities-focused research. The concept, known as Society & Culture under Urban Futures, is an initiative within UC’s Next Lives Here strategic direction. The Office of Research generates data-driven insights that inform leadership strategies for various national awards and programs such as the Guggenheim Fellowship. 

Created and initially funded in 1925 by US Senator Simon and Olga Guggenheim in memory of their son John Simon, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has sought to “further the development of scholars and artists by assisting them to engage in research in any field of knowledge and creation in any of the arts, under the freest possible conditions.”

Since its establishment, the Guggenheim Foundation has granted over $400 million in Fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award, and other internationally recognized honors. The broad range of fields of study is a unique characteristic of the Fellowship program.

The Guggenheim Foundation centers the talents and instincts of the Fellows, whose passions often have broad and immediate social impact. For example, in 1936, Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and dedicated it to the Foundation’s first president, Henry Allen Moe. Photographer Robert Frank’s seminal book, The Americans, was the product of a cross-country tour supported by two Guggenheim Fellowships. The accomplishments of other early Fellows like e.e. cummings, Jacob Lawrence, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Martha Graham, and Linus Pauling also demonstrate the strength of the Guggenheim Foundation’s core values and the power and impact of its approach. More information at gf.org

Featured image at the top: A music score. Photo/iStock by Getty Images (alengo).