The IU Cinema Jon Vickers Scoring Award Program
Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2026, the IU Cinema Jon Vickers Scoring Award is a juried competition that awards a composition student from the Jacobs School of Music with a commission to write an original score for a silent film. The score then receives its world premiere at IU Cinema, where it is performed live by an ensemble of student musicians to a screening of the film.
Past scores have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art; included in renowned festivals like the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (Le Giornate del Cinema Muto), the Venice Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival; and made available on such home-video releases as Kino Lorber’s acclaimed box set Cinema’s First Nasty Women, which was deemed “a mind-expanding endeavor and a triumph of scholarship” by The New York Times.
