Young composers write songs for Bravo! Vail musicians
With the help of Bravo! Vail musicians, kids got to learn how to write their own music during the Very Young Composers Program, and the songs will be played live for the public July 23-24.
The students range in age from 8 to 15 in this summer’s program and met last week to learn how to take their ideas and melodies and create music for professional musicians to play.
“We teach them how to write an ostinato, which is basically a musical pattern that is repeated. We’ll talk about what four instruments they’re writing for and how we can create sounds from them. We learn how we take our ideas from the brain to a keyboard, keyboard to paper and add in the different instruments that they get to write for,” said Conrad Kehn, executive and co-artistic director of Playground Ensemble.
Very Young Composers was created by Jon Deak, a bassist, soloist, associate principal and a composer for the New York Philharmonic for 40 years and his friend, Bill Gordh, who is also from New York City and a storyteller and a banjo player.
This unique music day camp for kids is a collaboration between Bravo! Vail Music Festival, who works with Denver’s Playground Ensemble, and is hosted under YouthPower365, which is part of the Vail Valley Foundation.
Before even learning how to write music, Kehn said the students learn about emotion and music.
“We do some lessons on how you can show emotion and mood in music and that’s such a subjective thing, but there does seem to be some things that are the same. For example, ‘angry’ sounds like this or ‘sad’ sounds like this, so, we try to help them with that a little bit,” Kehn said.
The thing that the educators don’t want to do is bog the students down with having to write the music correctly on paper.
“These young people come up with really great musical ideas. It’s something in their imagination and more than their hands could do on a piano, or if they had to write it out themselves,” Kehn said. “So, we have them often sing it to us or play it for us sometimes, and then we record them and then we go home and we do the notation for them.”
On Monday, there will be a dress rehearsal with four professional musicians before the concerts at the Avon Public Library on Tuesday and at the Vail Public Library on Wednesday. Both concerts are at 1 p.m.
“On concert days, the kids get to hear their creations and they are sort of wide-eyed, listening to the performers play what they created. They get to bow in front of the audience and it’s really fun to watch,” Kehn said. “From the audience’s standpoint, it’s great to hear these creations and realize that kids are so imaginative. It’s a lot of fun for all.”
Read the full article at VailDaily.com