What an honor! My first Concert Band piece, REMEDY, was selected as the winner of the 2025 Silver Melted Into Sound Composition Contest.
Held annually by Wright State University,
Silver Melted Into Sound is a festival celebrating the unique voices and viewpoints we all bring to music and the arts. Beginning as a music festival for concert bands, vocal ensembles, and string orchestras designed to support the programming of diverse composers, it has grown to include the works of writers, poets, and new composers.
One day in late January, I learned about the Call for Compositions. The post read:
"The music festival, Silver Melted Into Sound, calls for compositions designed to increase repertoire written by underrepresented composers including people of color, women and other marginalized genders, or persons with a disability and draw attention to Ohio Poet Laureate, Kari Gunter-Seymour."
Dabbling in concert band writing but never having finished an entire concert band piece, I decided that this project was made for me. I had just finished my winter writing, and reading about this call for compositions lit a fire in me. I read through the four selected poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour and felt most inspired by the one entitled "Spring in the Hollow."
I suppose the rest is history, and I cannot wait for you all to hear my piece, Remedy. The piece will be premiered by Wright State University during the 2025-2026 school year.
Thank you to the Wright State music faculty for holding this festival and for doing such important work in supporting and encouraging the works of underrepresented composers!
I want to give a special shoutout and huge thanks to my middle and high school band directors, who supported and encouraged my passion for learning how to play different instruments. Not everyone knows that I started out on flute in 6th grade and then switched to clarinet in 7th. And aside from marching percussion in high school, clarinet was my primary instrument until halfway through my first year of college.
My band directors not only let me take home instruments to learn, but they also let me play them in various bands. I played trumpet and tenor sax in pep band, baritone in the freshman band (during my junior year free period), and trumpet and trombone in jazz band (where I had the privilege of sitting next to and learning from the one and only Doug Rosenthal).
I am forever grateful for the knowledge and experiences I gained during those years, which most definitely helped me write this piece!
Thank you also to my friends who took the time to listen to the piece before I submitted it, and to my wife, Erin, for all her support. About a week before the piece was due, I let her listen for the first time to what I had written. It was far from finished and I was losing hope that I'd even complete it in time. I had spent the last month going back and forth in my mind about whether or not I'd be able to get this done...
After listening, she looked at me with the widest eyes and said, "You HAVE to finish this!!" Her response was the reality check I needed to hang in there and put in the final week of work.
I think the biggest takeaway from this experience is to trust the spark of your intuition, and that although imposter syndrome is real, amazing things can happen when you believe in yourself and have others who believe in you, too.
I'll end this blog with a quote from Diane Mariechild that I read in the wings of "The Artist's Way" by Julia Cameron. I read the quote in my last few weeks of composing Remedy, and it spoke to me so much that I wrote it on a post-it note and put it up where I could be reminded of it daily. Here's what it said:
"Trust that still, small voice that says, 'This might work and I'll try it'."
Comments ()