By Makenna Hall, Managing Editor of Content
The 2019 Student Composer’s Concert will provide a group of Susquehanna musicians the opportunity to perform their compositions live for an audience at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 19 in Stretansky Concert Hall.
This year’s concert organizer, junior Emily Hendershot, emphasized that the concert will showcase different styles and genres of music.
“I’m hoping [the audience will] maybe get more interest in modern classical music, neo-classical and recognizing that there are different genres out there being written by people their age,” Hendershot said.
Junior composer Spencer Ostrowsky shared similar sentiments: “Some of us, like me, write more conceptual type music and some people write more traditional music. So, it will be fun to see the different styles on display.”
Ostrowsky’s conceptual music will be on display at the concert with a four-minute piece centered around the concept of solipsism. His piece will feature 10 students moving about the concert hall with their cellphones, each playing a different sound file that Ostrowsky created, while he plays drone, or low notes, on the piano.
“Every person in the hall is going to have a different experience. So it’s kind of like, we all have the common experience, we’re all hearing the same music but we’re all kind of experiencing it differently,” Ostrowsky said.
For upper-classmen, the concert allows them to showcase what they have learned from their time at Susquehanna.
Through his experiences composing, Ostrowsky has learned what the audience does and does not like to listen to.
“It’s kind of like a balance between what I want and what the audience will experience,” Ostrowsky said.
Being a more conceptual composer, Ostrowsky tends to have bigger scale ideas that he rescales into smaller ones.
“We talk a lot about framing in our composition lessons,” he said. “So, you have this piece of art and you need to frame it so that people can digest your message in the way you were hoping they would.”
Hendershot also discussed dealing with making music digestible for an audience, as her piece for this concert is just under 17 minutes long. The piece, titled “And Night Has its Ear,” will be broken into four parts.
“The idea is each movement is a different time of night, so it’s like taking you through different scenes of nighttimes,” Hendershot said.
The piece was composed for a solo flautist and will also include elements of electronic music. Hendershot said that she began composing her piece with a certain flautist in mind, junior Katie Owens.
Owens explained how she always enjoy performing the work of student composers and was honored when Hendershot decided to compose a piece with her in mind.
“It’s so much fun working with a composer who already knows how I play because she’s able to already write beautifully for my instrument as well as my personal tone,” Owens said. “Also already having that trust and understanding of each other’s musicianship made it a lot more fun since she was able to leave some dynamics or tone choices to me.”
For first-year composers, this concert will act as their first time having their compositions played live for a college audience.
First-year composer Rae Carroll shared her experience composing for this binannual concert.
“A lot of what I knew already in terms of getting a group together and rehearsing productively applied to getting ready for the composer concert, so it’s great that I can translate what I know into working towards larger goals,” Carroll said.
Carroll chose to create a piece for an instrument she was comfortable with: the flute. Carroll also used the opportunity of the concert to develop an idea for a piece she had in the past.
“I took a melody idea I had from a while back and reinvented it for a fuller flute choir and expanded on what I already had. Though I had a slow start, soon enough the piece came together in an organic manner,” Carroll said.
Carroll, Ostrowsky and Hendershot will be joined by seven other student composers on the night of the concert, each having composed a single piece for the show.
