'Make Room: New Shipment' showcases original compositions by students, instructors

For students looking to get out of their comfort zone and showcase their creativity, music composition is the way to go. On Wednesday, Oct. 4, some of these students will show off the fruits of their labor in the Tufts Composers' Concert “Make Room: New Shipment.” The concert will feature both students’ and professors’ original works, with many being performed for the first time and none more than 10 years old. The concert is part of the Tufts Composers' Concert Series, which was founded by John McDonald, former chair of the Department of Music and current music and composition professor. McDonald will perform many of his own students’ pieces on the keyboard.

“What I like about Tufts is that it’ll put on these concerts where some of the faculty brings their own compositions, and some of the students do as well. I think it’s really inspiring for both sides,” Opera Ensemble Director Thomas Stumpf said.

Stumpf, an accomplished pianist and composer who has also taught at the New England Conservatory and played in the Boston Pops Orchestra, firmly believes professionals should get out of their "bubble" — precisely what concerts like this one help them accomplish.

“People are stuffy about it," Stumpf said. "In some conservatories, the composition teachers don’t want their pieces played alongside [those of] students."

In this upcoming concert, Stumpf will be playing several students’ pieces as well as two of McDonald’s pieces written specifically for him: “To Charm with Sorrow” and “Trying Again to Charm with Sorrow.” The pieces give a nod to Stumpf’s own style, which he describes as dark and serious.

“In a way, the character of the pieces has to do with who I am, not so much as a human being but who I am as a pianist,” Stumpf said.

In turn, he has composed a series of three pieces for McDonald to perform, called “Three Johns for John.” The title is a reference to the three composers who inspired the pieces — Mozart, Bach and Brahms — all of whose given names are equivalent to the English name “John."

The inspiration, however, really came from McDonald.

“The idea for this one came when we were doing a recording session and John was fooling around playing a Mozart minuet we both loved, and he was playing it wrong," Stumpf said. "He used the right hand in place of the left hand … It was funny, but it stuck with me: picking a piece by Mozart and making it sound modern, but true to the original."

The concert will showcase ten composers, each contributing either one single piece or a group of short pieces. McDonald and Stumpf will trade off playing each student’s compositions on one keyboard on stage. Almost all the pieces are solos, save for two piano/cello duets (with faculty cellist Emmanuel Feldman), and one piece that incorporates piano, guitar and vocals: a new version of "Dying Crapshooter’s Blues" by graduate student Micah Huang. In this case, the composition is not an entirely new piece, but an existing piece reinterpreted and reworked.

Some student composers have taken a different approach. Matthew Feder, a fifth-year senior majoring in music, composed several short, purely original pieces for the concert under McDonald’s tutelage. Over the summer, Feder began learning the piano with McDonald, which meant playing as well as composing piano music.

“[The pieces] were all created with a different approach in mind. John would give me a prompt for each piece, like ‘the relationship between two notes,’ or ‘imagine a piece being played by two flutes,'" Feder said.

Feder also recalled the first time he saw his compositions performed in concert, which was last semester’s Composer’s Concert for a composition seminar. Listening to his own music was not easy.

“[Last semester] was the first time having other people play my music," he said. "You’re kind of giving up that control … It’s always been nerve-wracking."

But an unexpected upside to this experience was learning more about his own pieces.

“I’ll be interested whether [each piece] will sound different or, because I composed all of them, they’ll all sound like they came from the same thread,” Feder said.

A longtime guitarist and music lover, Feder is unique in that he has no classical training, unlike most other composers in his class. But as he puts it, “I don’t have that type of restriction. I grew up playing rock. I write based on what I feel.”

Aside from McDonald and Stumpf, three other accomplished composers and musicians will present their pieces alongside students’ work. One is guest composer Howard Frazin, who met McDonald while president of a local music organization called “Composers in Red Sneakers” in the early 2000s. He later went on to become founder and co-director of “Wordsong,” an organization that presents composers and performers to the public, and a teacher of Tufts graduate composer Alexander Hite, who will be performing in this concert as well. Others are Nathan Curtis, a former Tufts graduate student in music, and faculty composer Michael McLaughlin.

The composition series at Tufts was created by McDonald in 1994, and it puts on an average of five concerts per semester. However, “Make Room: New Shipment” is unlike all the others. The concert will honor the past as well as the future, as implied by the concert’s title. Curtis’ contributions will come from a piano collection in honor of his father, and the concert as a whole is dedicated to the life of Francis Domec, the husband of McLaughlin who tragically passed away this year. In McDonald’s words, Domec was “a painter of wonderful originality and life force,” and the concert will open with two of his own musical tributes to Domec.

That being said, the concert is just as much about giving a blessing to young composers beginning their composition journeys.

“[This concert is] the anticipation of new student composers entering the picture with new satchels of music in the baggage … new voices, new ideas, new approaches," McDonald said.

The concert offers somewhat of a new beginning for McDonald as well, who has spent a year on sabbatical and another as a visiting teacher at another school. In his first concert since returning to Tufts, McDonald said he is "poised for new possibilities."

The concert will be held on Wednesday from 8 to 10 p.m. in the Distler Performance Hall in the Granoff Music Center. Admission is free, and no tickets are required.