When Gavin Chuck ’88 (pictured on the left) walked onstage at the 2026 Grammy Awards to accept the prize for Best Chamber Music Performance with his ensemble Alarm Will Sound, he felt two things at once: deep satisfaction and almost no surprise. “I was thrilled and not the least bit surprised,” he wrote to friends backstage, adding that his confidence had nothing to do with entitlement and everything to do with “working on something day in, day out” with the same team for 25 years. For Gavin, was a point on a long line of shared effort, discipline, and curiosity that began at UWC‑USA.
Leadership, he says, is one of the clearest through-lines from Montezuma to the Grammy stage. The Jamaica National Committee that nominated Gavin for UWC-USA made it clear the movement sought and cultivated leadership, but Gavin’s lived experience at UWC-USA school transformed what the word meant to him. “People have an idea in their minds when they hear ‘leader’—it’s that rugged individualist,” he explains. “What UWC does is transform that. UWC embodies and encourages a different model of leadership that is an antidote to really toxic forms of leadership.”
On campus, that model wasn’t taught in a classroom so much as lived in rehearsal rooms, dayrooms, and the auditorium. Gavin remembers national days and performances where “we were planning, scripting, building sets, and staying up until three in the morning to turn tables into mountaintops and lamps into stage lights.” Only much later did he realize that he had been learning production management and organizational leadership. “Now I supervise a team of people who do production management,” he says, “but I’m calling on the skills I learned in the day room at 3 a.m.”
Teamwork followed the same pattern–a practice developed in Montezuma that has served him in his career. “Wherever I’ve landed, I’ve found a team to work with,” Gavin says. That habit shaped his time at the Eastman School of Music, where the musicians who gathered around him gradually coalesced into Alarm Will Sound. “The one that stuck is the team that formed around me at Eastman,” he said. “We’ve stayed together as a team, and that’s the team that led Alarm Will Sound to this Grammy success.”
The Grammy‑winning album, featuring a composition by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy, asks listeners to approach sound with the same curiosity that has guided Gavin’s career. The piece traces a year in the Irish landscape, each of its twelve movements corresponding to a month and to the changing quality of light and time. “If you listen to the music with a sense of discovery, I think that it will transport you to an imaginative place that is what it feels like to be in the Irish landscape for a year,” Gavin explains. Built from spectral harmonies and unusual tunings, the music can sound “wondrous and strange,” at times frosty and cold like winter, at other moments sharp‑edged like the bright light of July and August.
“For this album in particular, but for the work that we do in general, we are driven by curiosity and discovery and innovation,” Gavin says. In a music world where most pieces are designed to comfort or entertain in familiar ways, he sees Alarm Will Sound working deliberately at the edge: small by design, experimental by intention and committed to giving audiences the gift of surprise.
Gavin traces that creative risk‑taking directly back to UWC‑USA’s classroom and dorm life. Higher Level IB Music pushed him to see himself as a composer for the first time. “If it wasn’t for the IB music program, I probably would not be composing,” he says. Just as important were late‑night listening sessions in Hunter House with classmates like Nicolas Borenstein from France, who opened up whole new worlds of classical music. “It was just one 16‑year‑old from Jamaica and one 16‑year‑old from France…in a room in Hunter House that sparked that,” Gavin says. “The chances of that happening are incredible.”
His gratitude extends to other classmates as well. “I also wanted to mention Axel Kober (’89) as another classmate who inspired me to pursue classical music while at UWC,” he says. “Axel is a phenomenally talented musician and now a very successful conductor. Seeing and hearing him play at such a high level was awesome, even in the little room of the campus center.”
Today, as an arts leader and executive director of Alarm Will Sound, Gavin sees little separation between composing music and composing organizations. The same creative muscles he once used to write scores now help him design infrastructures, lead teams and even craft the occasional high‑stakes email. “In the best cases, the categories of artist and administrator bleed into each other,” he says. “Sometimes creative expression takes the form of pitches and rhythms; sometimes it takes the form of organizational infrastructure.”
From late nights in the UWC-USA dayroom to the bright lights of the Grammy stage, Gavin Chuck’s journey is a testament to what happens when a young person is trusted with real responsibility in a truly global community—and then carries that collaborative ethic into a lifetime of music, leadership and discovery.