Young Composers 2024

Every summer at Dawn's Piano, students who are continuing lessons from the previous school year have the opportunity to compose, notate and record original music with our Young Composers program. At the end of the summer we collect the sheet music into a single book file, and upload the audio tracks of each student piece into an album, and that's what we're sharing with you today! 

Composing music is a wonderful way to exercise some creativity and enjoy a change of focus during summer lessons, while putting into practice the music theory understanding that students have built during the school year. It's one of my favorite times in the studio year, and many students also highly anticipate this season of creativity, and enjoy getting to take ownership of their musical journey in a new way.

It is important to me that the equipment and programs we use for this project are accessible for any students who would like to continue composing on their own. So  student notation is made using Noteflight, you can learn more about that notation program and why I've chosen it for this project here. And audio recordings are made on the studio's Yamaha p71 digital piano using GarageBand. 

For students who are out of town when the studio is all set up for recording week, we export the audio file from the Noteflight. This means that *most* of the music you'll hear is performed by the student composer, though there are a few that are interpreted by the software. 

So, here is our finished project for 2024! Click here or the image below to view or download the book of collected sheet music. 

And use the player below to listen to this year's album. If you'd like to download your piano kid's track, you can find it in this folder.