Michael Unger

Michael Unger is a doctoral student at Eastman, and is also the instructor of the organ literature courses.  Michael completed masters’ degrees in both organ and harpsichord at the Eastman School of Music as a student and teaching assistant of David Higgs and William Porter, and in 2007, he was awarded Eastman’s Jerald C. Graue Musicology Fellowship. Previously, he completed undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario, where he was a graduating recipient of the University Gold Medal.  Former teachers include Ethel Briggs, Sandra Mangsen, Joel Speerstra and the late Larry Cortner, in addition to European summer academies specializing in historical keyboard performance.

In 2008, Michael was awarded both First Prize (Lilian Murtagh Memorial Prize) and Audience Prize in the 2008 American Guild of Organists’ National Young Artists Competition in Organ Performance (NYACOP).  Later that same year, he won First Prize in the Sixth International Organ Competition Musashino-Tokyo, Japan, a prize which included the Yoshida Minoru Memorial Award, Toyota Mayor’s Award and Tokorozawa MUSE Award.  In 2009, he was awarded Second Prize (Flentrop Orgelbouw Prize) and Audience Award (Izaäk Kingma Prize) in the Eighth International Schnitger Organ Competition on the historic organs of Alkmaar, the Netherlands, the first ever North American prize winner in the competition’s history.  He is the recipient of numerous other awards, including two of Canada’s top scholarships for the study of organ and church music, the Lilian Forsyth and Godfrey Hewitt Memorial Scholarships, both awarded in Ottawa in 2007.