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The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition is an annual prize instituted by H. Charles Grawemeyer,...

The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition is an annual prize instituted by H. Charles Grawemeyer, industrialist and entrepreneur, at the University of Louisville in 1984. The award was first given in 1985. Subsequently the Grawemeyer Award was expanded to other categories: Ideas Improving World Order (instituted in 1988), Education (1989), Religion (1990) and Psychology (2000). The prize fund was initially an endowment of US$9 million from the Grawemeyer Foundation. The initial awards were for $150 000 each, increasing to $200 000 for the year 2000 awards. The selection process includes a knowledgeable lay committee, which makes the final prize determination; Grawemeyer insisted that great ideas are not exclusively the domain of academic experts. However, in 1998 Kyle Gann wrote that after researching the top composition prizes in America, including the Grawemeyer Award for Music, he discovered that the penultimate award panels often included "the same seven names over and over as judges": Gunther Schuller, Joseph Schwantner, Jacob Druckman (now deceased), George Perle, John Harbison, Mario Davidovsky, and Bernard Rands. Gann concluded that since all of these composers are white