Workshop #15 Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop Recordings

Students at LREI take part in the innovative music curriculum the Young Composers & Improvisors Workshop (YCIW). YCIW seeks to give every student the opportunity to explore how music works through making original music. Our 5th grade composers are premiering their second large scale compositions. Explorations for these pieces focused around the ways in which a melody can correspond to an underlying harmony. This deepened our work with consonance and dissonance to include chord structures, chord progressions as well as orchestration techniques. Like any in depth creative work each student made unique personal discoveries as they bumped against new challenges related to their work. As you read through the program notes I think you’ll be struck, as I was, about the many ways in which our students conceived of their music. It is one thing to know how music works but it is quite another to successfully use those principles in service of a larger creative vision as these composers have done. Their reflections and descriptions remind me of some of the most important qualities for the artist to have. It’s perhaps best summed up by one young composer who wrote, “if you think really hard about what you should add to your piece you won’t come up with any good ideas but when you relax and just let the music play you come up with your best ideas!!”

This concert also featured pieces composed in the high school music elective Music Works as well as compositions from our Adult (r)Ed class.

The concert was performed by YCIW artists-in-residence the Metropolis Ensemble under the direction of Andrew Cyr.