Category: Projects

Listen to five engaging, highly individual works composed by musical novices under the guidance of composer Stacy Garrop and Festival Co-Artistic Director David Ying.

We recently received audio recordings of several compositions by participants in the Hyperscore II project for the famed Skaneateles Music Festival. In April and May of 2011, composer Stacy Garrop visited schools in upstate New York, teaching students what it takes to compose music. Stacy helped kids of all ages to discover the music within; participants ranged in age from 10 to adult and included students from A.J. Smith Elementary in Union Springs, West Genesee Middle School and Skaneateles High School, as well as employees of ChaseDesign. The project culminated with the Hyperscore II Community Celebration at the 2011 festival.

We were very impressed by how each piece expresses a distinctive personality and diversity of structure. Click on the gallery images below to see what these pieces look like in Hyperscore.

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A Toronto Symphony. In this unprecedented creative experiment, composer Tod Machover has invited the citizens of Toronto to help create a new symphony orchestra piece. Several hundred school children participated, using Hyperscore to compose music about their city. Read this Musical Toronto blog post about what they accomplished. Here is one example, by Broadlands P.S. student Nebyou. His Hyperscore piece is displayed in the projection. The music is being played by members of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra:

From the U.S. to Armenia, Kids Build a Musical Bridge. A-to-A, a project of the Luys Foundation, brought together children from Armenia and America to compose music together. In this photo montage, we see images from workshops and the concert at Armenia’s National Opera where Hyperscore composition were performed by the national symphony orchestra and DOGMA, a popular rock band (heard here playing one of the Hyperscore compositions). Read more: “When a “DREAM” comes true.” 

Here is the entire concert performed at the Armenian National Opera theater:

Festival City, commissioned by the 2013 Edinburgh International Festival. It received its premier performance on August 27th, 2013, with the Royal Scottish Orchestra under the baton of Peter Oundjian. This piece incorporated Hyperscore compositions by children in Edinburgh.

A Symphony for Lucerne, commissioned by the Lucerne Festival, was premiered in September 2015, with Matthias Pintscher conducting the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra. Hundreds of sound recordings were contributed by Lucerne residents, along with Hyperscore compositions by school children. During the world premier performance, a barfuessfäger band from Lucerne’s famous Fasnacht (carnival) burst through the doors in the back of the hall and marched down the aisles to the front of the stage, filling the stately concert hall with its raucous sounds. Watch the performance here.

Symphony in D, commissioned by the Detroit Symphony, was premiered in November of 2015 by the Detroit Symphony under the baton of Leonard Slatkin. The project engaged a wide range of collaborators, from street musicians to a Syrian Christian choir, school kids to senior citizens, electronica to poets. Watch here.

Philadelphia Voices is the sixth and largest-scale installment of Tod Machover’s acclaimed City Symphonies. Through specially-designed mobile technologies developed by Machover and his Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab, Machover has given residents of Philadelphia the opportunity to contribute their own samplings of cityscapes, vocalizations, and texts, reviewed and compiled by Machover and his team, uniting the richly diverse communities of Philadelphia through sound. The result is a celebration of the birthplace of American democracy written for, and with, the Philadelphians who know it best.

Philadelphia Voices premiered on April 5, 2018 (with two subsequent performances on April 6th and 7th) with The Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, with a troupe of voices – Westminster Symphonic Choir, Keystone State Boys Choir and Pennsylvania Girlchoir, Sister Cities Girlchoir – representing Philadelphia-area choruses. The final performance of Philadelphia Voices took place in New York at Carnegie Hall on April 10, 2018, marking the first presentation of a City Symphony given outside the city for which it was written.

Visit the Philadelphia Voices website.