Young Composers Competition

CMS Director Nicole Springer: “Welcome to the Young Composers Competition Concert. I'm Nicole Springer. I'm the director of the community music school sponsored by a fund established by Ardan and Harry Fisher. This year marks the 22nd anniversary of our competition. Congratulations to this year's winners.

We are fortunate to have two of our winners, Michael Chang and Harlon Olsen here with us today. And we are so happy to have our group from Friendship Village. Thank you for attending. I want to thank CMS staff member and YCC coordinator Justin Blackburn for his expert organization coordinating the competition and performance.

I also want to thank Chamber Project St. Louis for our ongoing partnership. It is a privilege for our student composers to have their works performed by professional musicians and see their compositions come to life. So, I will now turn it over to Justin Blackburn who will introduce our guest composer. Thank you.”

[Applause]

CMS Young Composer Competition Coordinator: “Thank you, Nicole. And thank you all for joining us. Our guest composer this year is a St. Louis native and a dear friend to the young composer competition. She has been a judge for our competition for several years and is always uh encouraging, insightful, and inspiring in her commentary and her criticisms of the student entries.

It's been a joy to have her here today and to witness what I've only previously seen in text form on a piece of paper in a room as she's working with these young composers.

Stephanie has written for some of the largest and best ensembles around St. Louis Symphony along with Sound, the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Rochester Symphony Orchestra, and recently I have learned she's conquered Alaska.

She's working on a commission for a group up there and I believe Alaska Symphony Orchestra has performed her work.

But lest that sounds like she's got enough on her plate, she also raises chickens and makes fruit leather in her car and a lot of fascinating things. So, I'm going to quit babbling. Please join me in welcoming our guest, Stephanie Berg.”

[Applause]

Stephanie Berg: “Thank you so much. It is such an unbelievable pleasure to be able to be here in this capacity working with these incredible young musical minds.  I often get to know these young composers not through interacting with them directly but through their music itself and a lot of what I do is getting into people's minds through their creations. It's so deeply insightful and such an amazing thing to be able to do and to be able to be a part of this wonderful thing that we do as humans, this act of creation.

So Justin has given you perhaps a bit of a keyhole glimpse that I am probably not the usual type of person that you might meet and he has made the terrible mistake of handing me a microphone and telling you that I needed to fill 10 to 15 minutes of time that I will do gladly.

So, you're all going to come with me on just a little bit of a short journey. I was going to talk just a tiny bit about my musical philosophy which is ongoing and ever developing and may our philosophies continue to develop throughout our life. But the more I think about music and exist in music and make music and interact with music, the more that I've come to the real realization that music is an expressive language. Now, it's not a concrete language in the sense of like you would never be able to glean a recipe for a cream pie by listening to a piece of music without words. It's not that kind of language.

But I am again and again impressed with how music can convey sometimes startlingly specific ideas and pictures and concepts that transcend time and transcend culture. And the only thing that I can think of that does such a thing is language itself.

People often ask me when I'm writing music, how do I come up with notes and rhythms and harmonies to express what I'm expressing? And honestly, to me, it comes from the same place as words. If I were writing an essay, how do I decide what words I'm going to use to express what I'm thinking of?

And one of the things that I remark on, that I reflect on, is how language is universal in the human species. You know, we all speak different languages, and we all use our language a little bit differently, but we all speak language, you know, and similarly, all cultures across the world have music and that music sounds different across cultures, but we all have it.

Now, if you'll go with me just a little bit, this is where we go to weird town just for a minute.

So, biology is my second love. I have music. I also love biology as a hobby. I think I did that backwards. But there is a biological philosophy that states that the more universal a particular trait is within a given group of living things the more crucial it must be for survival. So if something is universal to a lot of different species then it must be very crucial to survival. So for example, the presence of having a beating heart is absolutely crucial for the survival of not just humans but all vertebrates.

That is an incredibly essential part of living. You cannot have vertebrate life without a heart apparently. By the same philosophy, tongues are also equally crucial to vertebrate life because all vertebrates have some form of a tongue. That's kind of funny, you know. And so there are all sorts of funny little things that you can start to think about that must, by this philosophy, be crucial for survival.

Now it might just be species-wide and it might just be population-wide but amongst humans, for example, apparently eyebrows are crucial for survival because there's no population on the planet that doesn't have eyebrows. You'll have individuals that don't have eyebrows or people who don't have much in the way of eyebrows such as myself, But everybody has some form of eyebrows. So therefore, eyebrows must be crucial to human survival, which is just kind of funny.

But with this mentality, we know that language is crucial for human survival. And also by this mentality, music is apparently crucial for human survival.

And in this world where as musicians we very frequently feel like we constantly have to prove our worth and our worthiness of being funded, I think it's very interesting to look at it from this perspective. Maybe we don't understand it. Maybe we don't necessarily know how to quantify it. But evidently the creation of music is crucial for human survival.

So where am I going with that?

The creation of music is crucial for human survival. Certainly. and then if we are to assume that perhaps music is an offshoot of language then I think that a lot of the challenges that we face in music become more clear when we consider music as a language.

There was an article that I read a long time ago that was comparing music to art as we very frequently do - music is wrapped up in the idea of the arts and justly so obviously. But there is this question of why there is wide acceptance of abstract art, visual art, but there's not as much of a wide acceptance of abstract music. And I think that perhaps the answer to this becomes a little bit more clear when we consider music from a linguistic standpoint.

When we come to music, I think we are expecting for it to say something to us, for us to be able to glean some sort of extra musical meaning from it. And so I will propose that perhaps instead of considering music as an art, perhaps we need to look at it more from the standpoint of literature.

Now, if I were to go to a concert and if I were go to go to a poetry reading and all of the poetry is in any language I don't speak, um, Italian, we'll say, I'm going to think that that's really cool for like 10 minutes, you know? But then after a while, it's difficult because that's not the language that I speak.

I think that this is one of the challenges that we face as musicians is sometimes there's a disconnect between the language that we speak and the language that the audience understands. I think that if we can explore that idea, a lot of the challenges that we face in promoting particularly new classical music, new fine art music, I think starts to become a little bit more clear and the path forward becomes more clear.

But in particular, what I'm struck with and how I bring this back to today is that I have had the pleasure of working with four young composers who demonstrate a very clear understanding of the language of music, the experticity of it, and how to convey their ideas clearly and musically and expressively and just beautifully.

So I want to congratulate these four composers again for their unbelievable accomplishments and for the contribution that they have already made to music and the contributions that I hope they will continue to make.

Thank you all very much.”

[Applause and cut to on screen graphic over musicians and audience]

“Harlan Olsen
Second Place Level I
Condensed Forms
Jennifer Mazzoni, flute
Dana Hotle, clarinet
Carolina Neves, violin
Marta Simidtchieva, cello”

[Applause, Harlan Olsen stands, and cut to on screen graphic over musicians and audience]

“Fabian Leung
Second Place Level II
Missing Flock at Dawn
Darwin Aquino, conductor
Carolina Neves, violin
Jane Price, violin
Sarah Borchelt, viola
Marta Simidtchieva, cello”

[Applause and cut to on screen graphic]

“Michael Chang
First Place Level I
Dance of Serendipity
Jane Price, violin
Sarah Borchelt, viola
Marta Simidtchieva, cello”

[Applause and Michael Chang stands. Cut to online graphic over musicians and audience]

“Jonah Cohen
First Place Level II
The G-D Clause
Darwin Aquino, conductor
Jane Price, violin
Marta Simidtchieva, cello
Nina Ferrigno, piano”

[Applause and cut to online graphic over musicians and audience]

“Stephanie Berg
Guest Composer
Gateway
Dana Hotle, clarinet
Nina Ferrigno, piano

[Applause with Stephanie Berg standing]