For more than five decades, Tania León has been a force to be reckoned with in the classical sphere.

The GRAMMY-nominated composer of large-scale and chamber works has won a New York Governor's Lifetime Achievement Award and a Pulitzer Prize In Music, the latter for her orchestral work "Stride," which the New York Philharmonic commissioned. Her recent commissions include works for New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, and pianist Ursula Oppens with Cassatt String Quartet.

León, who's held numerous residencies and faculty positions from Yale to Yaddo and beyond, today serves as an Honorary Chair for the Recording Academy's Songwriters & Composers Wing, a newly launched Academy membership division representing a vast and diverse community of music creators within these crafts.

Now, in the debut episode of Songwriter/Composer Sessions, a new series presented by the Songwriters & Composers Wing, León reflects on how her family life shaped her passions and how she wants to inspire up-and-coming music creators in the future.

"I think it's important to listen to the young musicians. The reason a young musician goes to a conservatory or to a university or whatever to study music is because they have the music inside already," she says in the episode. "The purpose is to get the music out of them, as opposed to [imposing] on them the music we prefer."

Check out the first episode of Songwriter/Composer Sessions above to learn more about how León wants to make the classical world a welcoming place for everyone—young or old, experienced or not.

Learn more about the Songwriters & Composers Wing and follow their official Instagram page for more updates.

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The Recording Academy’s Producers & Engineers Wing and Songwriters & Composers Wing are joining forces to host “A Celebration of Craft.” Taking place Wednesday, Jan. 31, at the GRAMMY Museum in Downtown Los Angeles, the inaugural event, the first-ever joint GRAMMY Week event for the Academy’s craft Wings, will honor seven-time GRAMMY winner Leslie Ann Jones for her prolific work as a recording and mixing engineer and record producer. The event will also salute the year-round work of the Producers & Engineers and Songwriters & Composers Wings and shine a light on the people working behind the scenes to create the year’s best musical works, including this year’s Songwriter Of The Year nominees. The premiere celebration kicks off the official start of GRAMMY Week 2024, the Recording Academy’s weeklong celebration comprising official GRAMMY Week events honoring the music community in the lead-up to the 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards.

“A Celebration of Craft” also debuts during a major development for the production and songwriting fields at the annual GRAMMY Awards. For the first time ever, the Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical and Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical categories will be awarded in the General Field of the GRAMMY Awards at the 2024 GRAMMYs next month. The Recording Academy announced these significant additions last June after they were voted on and passed by the Recording Academy’s Board of Trustees last May; relocating these categories allows all GRAMMY voters to participate in the voting process for these non-genre-specific categories and recognize excellence in the important fields of producing and songwriting.

“Songwriting and producing are some of the fundamental building blocks of our industry — in addition to, of course, performing and recording,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. told GRAMMY.com about the GRAMMY category changes." “We feel this change is an opportunity to allow our full voting membership to participate … We are excited that our entire voting body will be able to contribute to such important categories like Songwriter Of The Year and Producer Of The Year. Again, these are such important parts of our Awards process. But bigger than that, they're an important part of the music ecosystem. Since these categories are not genre-specific, and they are across many different genres, we felt it was responsible to put them in the General Field so everyone could vote for these important awards.”

A recording and mixing engineer and record producer for more than 40 years, Leslie Ann Jones has held staff positions at ABC Recording Studios in Los Angeles, the Automatt Recording Studios in San Francisco, and Capitol Studios in Hollywood. Now at Skywalker Sound, she continues her career recording and mixing music for records, films, video games, and television, and producing records primarily in the classical genre. Over the course of her career, she has worked with artists from Herbie Hancock, the Kronos Quartet, Holly Near, and Michael Feinstein to Santana, Bobby McFerrin, Charlie Haden, BeBe & CeCe Winans, ConFunkShun, and many more.

The first woman Chair of the Recording Academy’s Board of Trustees (1999-2001), Jones is the recipient of seven GRAMMY Awards, including four for Best Engineered Album, Classical and one for Best Immersive Audio Album. She serves on the Advisory Board of Institute for the Musical Arts, the Board of Directors of the Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), and she is an Artistic Advisor to the Technology and Applied Composition degree program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Jones was also inducted into the NAMM TEC Hall of Fame in 2019 and is a Heyser lecturer. She was also the recipient of the 2022 G.A.N.G. Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Jones chaired the committee that wrote “Recommendations for Hi-Resolution Music Production,” published by the Producers & Engineers Wing of the Recording Academy, and is also a member of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board.

“I’m so excited for our Producers & Engineers and Songwriters & Composers Wings to come together for ‘A Celebration of Craft’ later this month,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. said in a statement. “Both Wings are a critical part of our mission at the Recording Academy to create spaces for music creators to thrive, and I look forward to joining with music people from both of these communities to kick off our GRAMMY Week celebrations.”

“From her decades-spanning recording career to her work as former Chair of the Recording Academy’s Board of Trustees, a co-chair of the P&E Wing, and much more, Leslie Ann Jones has always been committed to the music community and to excellence in recording,” said Maureen Droney, Vice President of the Producers & Engineers Wing, in a statement. “It’s a privilege to convene our national network of creatives and technicians to salute her at ‘A Celebration of Craft’ with the Songwriters & Composers Wing, an essential collaborator in our effort to recognize the people behind the music.”

“‘A Celebration of Craft’ will mark the first GRAMMY Week event for the Songwriters & Composers Wing since our Wing was founded in 2021, and we could not be more enthusiastic to come together with our community for an evening dedicated to celebrating their creativity,” said Susan Stewart, Managing Director of the Songwriters & Composers Wing. “We’re thrilled to co-host this event with our friends in the Producers & Engineers Wing and pay tribute to the diverse creative professions in our industry together.”

The 2024 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 66th GRAMMY Awards, will air live from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Sunday, Feb. 4 (8 -11:30 p.m. LIVE ET/5-8:30 p.m. LIVE PT) on the CBS Television Network and will stream on Paramount+ (live and on demand for Paramount+ with SHOWTIME subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers the day after the special airs).

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Updated on Thursday, July 14: The air date for the 2023 GRAMMYs, officially known as the 65th GRAMMY Awards, has been announced. The 2023 GRAMMYs will air live Sunday, Feb. 5, from the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles and will broadcast live on the CBS Television Network and stream live and on demand on Paramount+. Nominations for the 2023 GRAMMYs will be announced on Tuesday, Nov. 15.

The 2021 GRAMMYs and 2022 GRAMMYs looked vastly different from past years due to the realities of a pandemic. But the 2023 GRAMMYs will be unique for purely positive reasons.

Today, the Recording Academy announced a brand-new GRAMMY Award category: Songwriter Of The Year, Non-Classical. (This was among many other new category additions, including Best Alternative Music Performance, Best Americana Performance and Best Score Soundtrack For Video Games And Other Interactive Media, as well as other process amendments and updates to the GRAMMY Awards process.)

The 2023 GRAMMY nominations are officially here. See the complete list of nominees across all 91 GRAMMY categories.

"We're so excited to honor these diverse communities of music creators through the newly established awards and amendments, and to continue cultivating an environment that inspires change, progress and collaboration," Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. expressed in a statement. "The Academy's top priority is to effectively represent the music people that we serve, and each year, that entails listening to our members and ensuring our rules and guidelines reflect our ever-evolving industry."

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Mason's comments speak to the greater winds of change surrounding these developments. But what of the GRAMMY for Songwriter Of The Year specifically?

To help music lovers and the wider music community understand the significance of this momentous development, GRAMMY.com spoke to leaders at the Songwriters & Composers Wing, who worked with Recording Academy executives to develop and launch the Songwriter Of The Year GRAMMY category.

In this informative interview with S&C Wing Managing Director Susan Stewart and Chair Evan Bogart, learn more about the thinking behind the creation of the GRAMMY for Songwriter Of The Year — and how to qualify for this magnificent honor.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

What was the impetus for the institution of the GRAMMY for Songwriter Of The Year? Why was now the perfect time to launch this new category?

Susan Stewart, Managing Director, Songwriters & Composers Wing: With the launch of the Songwriters & Composers Wing, we wanted to show our dedication to true craft writers. It was the perfect time with the launch of the Wing to initiate this. It has a longer history, but it really did help having the Wing to stand behind it.

Evan Bogart, Chair of the Songwriters & Composers Wing: As somebody who's a songwriter first — I joined the [Recording Academy’s] Los Angeles Chapter Board in 2010 or 2011 — there weren't many songwriters, if any, on the Board at that point. There wasn't a lot of representation for songwriters in that regard. I wanted to find a way for songwriters to have a seat at the table and be honored for their contributions to music — and not only their contributions to creating songs, but to the entire musical landscape.

Over the course of the last decade-plus, the role of the songwriter has increased so much in the process of A&R, production, recording, mentorship, and artist development. It became so apparent that we needed a Wing to represent the more than 3,500 songwriters within the Recording Academy membership and the interests specific to songwriting, education, mentorship, advocacy, awards, and recognition.

Via that, we were able to make this dream of having an award that honors the compendium of an artist's yearly output and the impact it has each year on the musical landscape in the way the GRAMMYs have been honoring producers since 1975. I think the time to do that is now, and we have the support from the Wing, Academy and community.

People in the songwriting world have been calling for this award for more than a decade — the last decade that I've been listening. Maybe more than that! We just came to the right moment in time to put the weight of the new Wing behind it and create it.

By which metrics will Academy voting members judge the merits of various songwriters for the award on an annual basis?

Bogart: We're looking for which songwriters have demonstrated, first and foremost, that they're considered a songwriter first by the music community. We want to recognize the professional, hardworking songwriters who do this for a living — who wake up every day and think about how they're going to write songs for other people, and craft songs not only for themselves, but for other artists as well.

This isn't intended to just award an artist or producer with another award. This is focused on honoring the professional songwriters who hit the studio every day and try to craft the next song for somebody.

But that doesn't mean that artists and producers can't win this award. It just means that we're going to have certain thresholds within the award that need to be met in order to prove within your discography that you set out to be a professional songwriter as well.

Stewart: People may have questions about how they enter. What they have to do to enter in the OEP [Online Entry Process] is to have a minimum of five songs in which they're listed as a non-performing, non-producing songwriter or co-writer.

Bogart: On top of that, you can submit up to nine songs each year on behalf of yourself to show what you accomplished that year. You can put forth eight songs; you can put forth seven; you can put as many songs as you want — up to nine — in there. But five songs must demonstrate that you were not an artist nor a producer when you wrote them. For five songs, you have to be a non-performing, non-producing songwriter.

On top of that, you can put up to four more songs [on which] you were a producer and artist as well. Again, that is to make sure we are honoring people that the songwriting community views as songwriters first and foremost. You can be an artist, as long as you're [respectively] a songwriter and artist, not an artist and songwriter.

Stewart: We want people to understand that there are people behind these songs, who create a piece of art from nothing. We want to make sure they're recognized. It's an amazing profession.

The GRAMMY remains the highest honor in music — bar none. Through that lens, why does the GRAMMY for Songwriter Of The Year matter to the music industry and larger music community?

Bogart: The Songwriter Of The Year GRAMMY would be the greatest honor a songwriter could achieve in any year. To be honored by your peers for not just one song that you wrote, or an album that you worked on, but for the meaningful contribution and breadth of diversity of your songwriting across all genres in one given year would be the highest achievement that any songwriter could achieve — period.

Stewart: We're honoring their comprehensive body of songs released during the eligibility year. It just sheds such a light on the talent of those individual writers. It's a lot to be proud of for these esteemed creators.

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Spring is in the air, and live music is abundant once again. Why not get together for some uplifting tunes and terrific company during one of the biggest weeks in Austin, Texas?

That's what the Recording Academy — more specifically, the Texas Chapter of the RA — did while adjacent to South by Southwest this year. As the below clip attests, it was an affair filled with good vibes and great music.

Relive the exciting event in the minute-long recap, which includes snippets of speeches by Board of Trustees Chair Tammy Hurt and Texas Chapter Executive Director Christee Albino. The video also features drummers bringing the beat, young musicians expressing their excitement, and folks from all sectors of the music community simply enjoying themselves.

Enjoy the quick recap above, and keep checking back for more news about where the Recording Academy will pop up next — perhaps at a festival near you.

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Editor's Note: The 2022 GRAMMYs Awards show, officially known as the 64th GRAMMY Awards, has been rescheduled to Sunday, April 3, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The below article was updated on Tuesday, Jan. 18, to reflect the new show date and location.

Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr. stresses a few company values in particular, but one feels especially timely right now: transparency. Hence, GRAMMY nominations will now be determined by a majority, peer-to-peer vote of Recording Academy voting members.

It's now more crucial than ever for voting members to get involved this year to make this system work and lend their support to fellow musicians and creators.

To cap off the window of First Round GRAMMY Voting, which determines the nominees for the annual GRAMMY Awards and this year runs from Friday, Oct. 22, to Friday, Nov. 5, Recording Academy voting members are taking to social media to express all the reasons why it's important to get out and vote for the upcoming 64th GRAMMY Awards.

If you're a Recording Academy voting member and need an extra burst of motivation to get involved in the process, check the #Vote4GRAMMYs hashtag on Instagram and Twitter and listen to firsthand testimonies from fellow Recording Academy members about the importance of GRAMMY Voting below.

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In her message, GRAMMY-winning R&B singer/songwriter Monica expresses that the value of GRAMMY voting is twofold to her. 

"Voting for the GRAMMY Awards is not just important to me because I'm an artist; it's important to me because I'm a writer and composer," she says. "That means the most to you — to be acknowledged at the greatest height the music has to offer."

Taylor Hanson of "MMMBop" stars Hanson made a heartfelt video on the subject.

"The GRAMMYs is all about artists and music makers voting for projects they believe in," the three-time GRAMMY nominee says. "To me, it's a great way to highlight projects that should be recognized."

Heavy music is represented by way of Troy Sanders, a five-time GRAMMY nominee and the leader of GRAMMY-winning metal heroes Mastodon. "There's no one more qualified to recognize music's best than you," he says in an Instagram clip. "So, I encourage each of you to set some time aside and become as knowledgeable as you can."

A representative from the classical world has spoken up, too. As Deborah Pae, the cellist in the Formosa Quartet and a Governor of the Recording Academy's Chicago Chapter, puts it, "Voting allows us to make our voices heard, so this is our chance to advocate for artists that we feel are doing incredible work and are bringing something unique and important to the table."

Country singer/songwriter Lainey Wilson echoes Pae's sentiments, noting "the hours, the blood, the sweat, and the tears" that musical creatives pour into their art.

"Collaboration in music does not stop on the day it was created," Wilson stresses. "It truly is a nonstop collaborative effort in supporting each other, and one of the best ways to support other creators is through GRAMMY voting."

GRAMMY-winning soul singer/songwriter Leon Bridges contributed his own video to Instagram: "This is our opportunity to give back to some of the artists that shape our lives with their music," he says. "It's a moment to celebrate the producers and studio musicians and songwriters that really help bring these albums and songs to life."

Four-time GRAMMY-nominated salsa singer Víctor Manuelle also offers a passionate message about the importance of voting.

"Why is it important for me to vote for the GRAMMYs?" he asks in Spanish. "Because it gives me an opportunity to have a voice and to demand recognition of the music that represents us Latinos. We have a very big opportunity in our hands to decide which music we want to be awarded and nominated … So for me, it is very important to have a voice and a vote in the GRAMMYs."

And three-time GRAMMY-nominated Puerto Rican singer/songwriter Kany Garcia agrees.

"The artist sees the spotlight and is the center of attention, but there are all of those people behind the scenes that for years have been working to create a perfect, or almost perfect, sound in each of those songs," she says, also in Spanish. "That is why voting is important."

Last but certainly not least, GRAMMY-nominated Nigerian singer/songwriter Kah-Lo is right there with them.

"Make sure that who you feel should be recognized for their incredible work over the past year is honored the way they should be," she says. "Now, more than ever, everyone's voice counts because it's completely down to us. We have to do our part and make sure that after all this change, everything is worth it."

Keep checking back on GRAMMY.com and on the Recording Academy's social media channels for more important info and updates about GRAMMY voting and the upcoming 64th GRAMMY Awards!

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