“It’s a really great opportunity that I never even thought was possible,” she said.

Rochetti unveiled her piece alongside seven other student musicians at the Fordham Composers Concert, held on May 1 at Fordham Lincoln Center’s 12th-Floor Lounge. The annual event is the culmination of a semester’s work, where students develop their new pieces with top professionals who rehearse, provide advice, and ultimately perform the compositions for a live audience.  

Working at a Professional Level 

The Fordham Composers Workshop is a one-of-a-kind combination of theory and practice designed to give undergraduate students the experience of creating an original concert work at the professional level. Each student is assigned a different ensemble of three instruments to write for, culminating in a five-minute piece played on some combination of flute, clarinet, oboe, violin, or cello. 

The students then workshop the piece through multiple drafts which are read and played throughout the semester by members of the Exponential Ensemble —a chamber music collective made up of some of the most in-demand musicians in the New York City region.

“We’re working with professional musicians,” said Daniel Ott, D.M.A., associate professor of music theory and composition and chair of the art history and music department, who teaches the class. “It’s a really rare opportunity to get that hands-on experience when you’re a student.”

The format of the class is both lecture and workshop, as Ott spends half of the class time outlining classical composition principles and techniques. The other half allows students to engage directly with the instrumentalists, who offer insights and critiques on everything from the sonic impact of a key change to the proper way to notate specialty sounds like a flute growl.

“It’s not like any other regular class,” said Elena Smith, a senior music major at Fordham College at Rose Hill. “The structure of it is really different. It’s more interactive.”

Opening New Possibilities

The first Composers Workshop class was held in 2013. Since then, the small performances in the 50-seat Veronica Lally Kehoe Studio Theatre have grown to become an integral and vital part of artistic life on campus. In 2018, the final concert had its largest attendance to date when the student composers’ pieces were inspired by artworks from Fordham visual arts students. In 2020, during the pandemic, student works were still performed by the musicians despite their having to do so online —a monumental task that involved separate recordings of each part for every piece.

The class continues to be a highlight for students who relish the opportunity to combine academic rigor with personal expression.

“You just have complete creative freedom to create whatever you want with your music,” said Henry Domenici, a senior music major. “I really have enjoyed the opportunity to get to do that for a class.” 

As part of the biennial Fordham Composers Concert, students collaborate with professional musicians; this year the Exponential Ensemble provided expertise. Normally, students work on their compositions at Fordham College at Lincoln Center all semester and get to hear their music played live in May. But the pandemic forced students and musicians to coordinate from their homes across the globe, from New York to Paris to Australia.

When Ott, an associate professor in the Department of Art History and Music, gathered his students and the performers for a virtual concert, several remarked on the challenges one might least expect from playing music: the silent bits. Melodies and rhythms translated across digital distances, but silence proved more difficult. That’s because during a concert in a physical space, eye contact between musicians plays an important role during quiet pauses, something lost in virtual venues.

“There are moments in pieces where there is silence and the players look at each other and you just know, ‘I am breathing with you and we’ll just know when to start,’” said Anna Urrey, flutist with the ensemble. “For this concert, I tried to time out the silence, and I never got it right.”

Likewise, FCLC Senior Evan Donaldson appreciated the challenge.

“I could see where the tempo slows down to 20 seconds, that seems like something that would be extremely difficult to get right between three people on video, and it made me have a greater appreciation that the Exponential Ensemble took in order to sit down with sheet music and say, ‘I will do this as many times as I have to get it right,’” said Donaldson.

Pascal Archer, artistic director and clarinetist of Exponential Ensemble, said he would record his section of an audio file and send it on to oboist Kemp Jernigan. Jerigan would record atop Archer’s section and then send his cut to Anna Urrey to do the same.

“In concert, we would follow each other, and it’s easy to slow down and accelerate,” said Archer. In a concert, this would be done in a split second, but here it took a really long time.”

Although the students missed the live concert, they were left with a gift, said Donaldson.

“At the end of the day I’m grateful to have this perfectly made, plucked, tied-up-in-a-knot-and–bow audio file and video concert that I can show to people,” he said. “That’s really, really special.”