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The next generation of Manitoban composers will be on display this week at Canadian Mennonite University’s Laudamus Auditorium.
Composition students at CMU’s School of Music will showcase their latest works on March 12 at 11:30 a.m. as they continue to discover their musical voices and the ways in which they want to utilize it.
“My work actually started in high school when I pretty much accidentally composed my first original pop song,” shared Keira Medina in an interview on Morning Light. “I was like, ‘OK, well, I composed a song. So now what? I want to compose more!’”
This trajectory of songwriting to more traditional composition is one shared by Jay Buchanan, who graduated with a jazz voice degree at the University of Manitoba before pursuing composition and music therapy at CMU. During his previous degree, he also shared his own songs under the name Jason Willows.
“I was looking to try something new," he says. That’s when he met composition professor Liam Berry, who offered him that new avenue of creativity.
“We’ve discussed writing music for video games, which has been really, really fun to tackle. Lately, we’ve been writing for full score orchestra, which has been really awesome.”
While the jump to classical music composition from pop might seem a bit peculiar from the outside, Medina says that the genre has offered her more tools than she has previously used. “It has pushed me to think about structural approach I take to composition,” she says. “I could almost break free of my own constraints. As one of my professors Neil Weisensel says, ‘There are no rules. Everything is a draft until you die.’”
Medina also says that the creative atmosphere at CMU has helped her turn her drafts into fully-realized pieces. “The smaller class sizes make it so much more fun and easy to find somebody to collaborate with,” she says, adding that that’s how she found the pianist who will share her work at the upcoming showcase, a solo piano piece called The Hope of the Black Hole. “I find that a small environment like this... even just stepping into the practice room spaces, I can just hear people practicing and automatically get inspiration from that.”
Buchanan’s piece – a tribute to the character Ellen from the new Nosferatu film – will also be shared by a fellow music student. He thinks that the skills he is learning in this process will come in useful in all of his creative pursuits, from pursuing more learning in composing music for video games to adding new elements to his solo work. “It’s kind of opened my eyes that I don’t have to just write songs for my trio that are all about me or how I see things. They can be about a variety of things. I also would really love to incorporate some strings into my next record or next music project, because writing for strings is a heck of a lot of fun.”