Photos, clockwise from top: The Crossing, Brian d'Arcy James, Third Coast Percussion, Dover Quartet

Northwestern faculty and alumni are well represented among this year's Grammy Award nominees.

For the seventh consecutive year, Bienen School of Music faculty member Donald Nally and his new-music choir The Crossing have received a Grammy nomination for best choral performance, this year for Born, an album featuring the music of Michael Gilbertson and Edie Hill.

This marks the eighth nomination for Nally, who serves as director of choral organizations and professor of conducting and ensembles at Northwestern. The Crossing and Nally won the best choral performance Grammy in 2018 for The Fifth Century and in 2019 for Zealot Canticles. Nally has also received nominations for Rising w/The Crossing (2022), Carthage (2021), Voyages and The Arc in the Sky (2020), and Bonhoeffer (2017).

Alumni performers on Born include Micah Dingler ’09 MMus, Dimitri German ’16 MMus, Michael Jones ’14 MMus, Lauren Kelly ’19 MMus, Chelsea Lyons ’17 MMus, James Reese ’15, Tiana Sorenson ’19 MMus, and Elisa Sutherland ’12, ’14 MMus. Kevin Vondrak ’17 MMus served as assistant conductor and co-producer.

The Crossing also performed with JACK Quartet (with Austin Wulliman ’08 MMus) and musicians from the University of Michigan on an album nominated this year for best orchestral performance—John Luther Adams’s Sila: The Breath of the World. Adams received the Bienen School’s 2010 Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition, and Nally previously led Bienen musicians in the Midwest premiere of Sila in 2015 to celebrate the opening of the Ryan Center for the Musical Arts.

Dover Quartet, Bienen School Quartet-in-Residence since 2015, received a nomination for best chamber music/small ensemble performance for Beethoven: Complete String Quartets, Volume 2 – The Middle Quartets. The quartet also performed with Ian Rosenbaum on Andy Akiho's Ligneous Suite, nominated for best contemporary classical composition. Dover was previously nominated for best chamber music/small ensemble performance in 2021 for The Schumann Quartets. Current quartet members include Joel Link and Bryan Lee, violin; Hezekiah Leung, viola; and Camden Shaw, cello.

Third Coast Percussion—Sean Connors ’06 MMus; Robert Dillon ‘02; Peter Martin ’04 MMus, ’11 DMus; and David Skidmore ’05—received a nomination for their album Perspectives in the category of best chamber music/small ensemble performance. That album was also nominated for best engineered album, classical. Third Coast previously won a Grammy in 2017 for Steve Reich and received nominations for Archetypes (2022), Fields (2021), and Perpetulum (2020).

Northwestern School of Communication alumnus Brian d'Arcy James ’90 received a nomination for best musical theater album for the 2022 Broadway cast recording of Into the Woods, on which he is a principal vocalist with Sara Bareilles, Patina Miller, and Phillipa Soo. James received a nomination in the same category for Something Rotten! in 2016.

The Recording Academy will present the 65th Annual Grammy Awards on February 5, 2023. See a full list of nominees