Young Composers 2021


Drumroll please! I am proud to present our 8th annual Young Composers Project for 2021!

What is Young Composers?

Each summer at Dawn's Piano, continuing students get to dig into creating original music and learning about the composing process. In just a handful of lessons, students write, notate, practice and record tracks for their original music. This is a highly anticipated season by the students, and I am often asked throughout the year 'when will we get to do that thing where we write our own music again?'. For this project, I also intentionally choose to use software that is free or included with an OS (Noteflight for notating, GarageBand for recording), so that the programs we learn can be accessible for students to continue exploring and creating on their own if they are so inclined. 

For students who truly enjoy the process of creating music, this opens doors and helps them find ways into exploring that. And for all students, whether they're jazzed by creating new music or not, putting the music theory and notation into practice from an angle where they have ownership of it helps solidify that understanding and deepens engagement in learning the material. And finally, the change of pace as we shift our focus over the summer season is also something that we all tend to really enjoy during lessons. 

To learn more, or to see past Young Composers projects, click here

And Now, the Music!

Without any further ado, CLICK HERE for the book of this year's sheet music.

And listen here to the album!

*Most of the selections above were recorded by the student composer. However, because we do this in the summer, a few students were unable to attend lessons during our recording week due to vacation plans etc. The audio of their pieces, along with those of any online students, have been exported as MIDI from Noteflight and exported as audio through GarageBand to create their audio tracks.