Some composers hold full-time teaching posts. Others, like Thomas Adès or Esa-Pekka Salonen, maintain major conducting careers. But Paola Prestini offers a third model that seems very much of our time: along with being an award-winning composer, she has developed an equally significant career as an arts entrepreneur.
Born in Italy and reared in Arizona, Prestini is the co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust, which promotes new music in a multitude of styles. The high-tech, non-profit venue takes its name from a former sawdust factory in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
“When I’m creating programs and structures like Sawdust, I’m creating the infrastructures, the possibilities for them to exist in the same way that I organize sound,” Prestini said. “That’s been my biggest challenge, but’s it also who I am.”
