Medal Day

We are delighted to welcome the public back to MacDowell for this year’s Medal Day, featuring the presentation of the 66th Edward MacDowell Medal to acclaimed composer and musician artist Anthony Braxton.

The festivities will include a Medal Day ceremony, featuring speeches honoring Braxton's significant impact on jazz and the musical world at large, as well as acceptance remarks from Braxton.

After the ceremony, guests are invited for a picnic lunch on MacDowell's grounds. Picnic lunches catered by Fiddleheads Cafe can be purchased in advance, or guests are welcome to bring their own picnic lunch. After lunch, visitors are invited to explore MacDowell’s 450-acre historic campus and tour artist studios, where they can connect with our current Fellows and learn more about their work at MacDowell.

In celebration of Medal Day, we are also excited to host free programs for the public in the week leading up to Medal Day. Please stay tuned for further details on these exciting programs and our expanded New Hampshire arts programming.

Medal Day is made possible and remains free and open to the public thanks to the generous support of individual contributors and business sponsors. This Medal Day, we invite you to join us for the Medal Day Benefit, held the night before the main Medal Day ceremony on Saturday, June 27 from 6-9pm. The evening will feature cocktails, speeches, dinner prepared by Chef Erik Johansen and the MacDowell kitchen, live music, and dancing, all under the Medal Day tent.

As MacDowell's largest regional fundraising event, all funds raised at the Medal Day Benefit will go towards supporting our year round work of providing a space for the arts to flourish.

If you would like to purchase tickets for the Benefit, sponsor Medal Day 2026, or make a donation to MacDowell today, please click the donation button below. For any questions, please contact events@macdowell.org.

Anthony Braxton (born 1945), the Chicago-born composer and multi-instrumentalist, is recognized as one of the most important musicians, educators, and creative thinkers of the past 50 years. He is highly esteemed in the experimental music community for the revolutionary quality of his work and for the mentorship and inspiration he has provided to generations of younger musicians. Drawing upon a disparate mix of influences from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Braxton has created a unique musical system that celebrates the concept of global creativity and our shared humanity. His work examines core principles of improvisation, structural navigation and ritual engagement - innovation, spirituality, and intellectual investigation.

From his early work as a pioneering solo performer in the late 1960s through to his eclectic experiments on Arista Records in the 1970s, his landmark quartet of the 1980s, and more recent endeavors, such as his cycle of Trillium operas and the day-long, installation-based Sonic Genome Project, his vast body of work is unparalleled. His small ensembles of the 1970s through to the present day are considered among the most innovative groups of their respective eras, while his Creative Orchestra Music has brought together the varying streams of American jazz orchestras, marching bands, and experimental practices with the traditions of European concert music in a wholly individual compositional voice. His continuing and evolving current systems of the past 15 years, including Ghost Trance Music, Diamond Curtain Wall Music, Falling River Music, Echo Echo Mirror House Music, and ZIM Music, have served as the artistic incubators for some of the most exciting artists of the current generation. Braxton’s many awards include a 1981 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1994 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2013 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a 2014 NEA Jazz Master Award, and honorary doctorates from Université de Liège (Belgium), New England Conservatory (USA) and the 2020 United States Artists Fellowship.

The Edward MacDowell Medal has been awarded annually since 1960 to an individual artist who has made an outstanding contribution to their field. These artists include Leonard Bernstein, John Updike, Georgia O'Keeffe, I.M. Pei, Stephen Sondheim, and Toni Morrison. The artistic discipline in which the award is given rotates in order to celebrate all of the creative fields practiced at MacDowell. Following the ceremony, visitors enjoy a picnic lunch and tour open studios. Both the award ceremony and the open studios are free, and open to the public.

Anthony Braxton was chosen by this year’s Medal selection panel, chaired by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey and compromising of luminaries of the arts world including Marcos Balter, Courtney Bryan, Susie Ibarra, Miya Masaoka, Matana Roberts, Alex Ross, Du Yun, and Fay Victor.