Barlow Endowment Day 1

These past few days, I have had the amazing opportunity to hang out with several modern composers of our day at the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition. Everything that went on was so interesting to me and quite inspiring. I had so much fun doing this.

First off, I got this opportunity from BYU to be an intern for this competition. The Barlow Endowment is specific towards music composition and gives composers a chance to get their names out there as well as compete for a hefty prize (this year was $12,000 to write a piece for Piano Trio). So cool.

My job as an intern was to file all of the applications. As boring as filing and data entry is, this was really neat. I got to know composers better. I got so see where all of the applications were coming from and to see, in person, all of the music that was coming in. All of the applications were due by June 1, and we had everything filed away by the end of that first week in June.

After all the filing was done, I had to wait until the beginning of August where I was to be present at the judging of all of these applications. The judging took place at a beautiful resort at Snowbird. I thought it was really cool to take all the applications and to go far away into the mountains to judge everything. It was really nice and relaxing to be there, and it was absolutely beautiful (smack forehead because I forgot my camera!).

I will chronicle everything a day at a time because there was so much that happened in each day. This post would be forever long if I didn't.

I arrived in Snowbird on Sunday evening, August 1. The main thing we did was get a quick run-through of what we were supposed to do and then we set up the rooms with a sound system and the applications for the judging the next morning.

The morning came, and after a huge all-you-can-eat breakfast, all the interns and judges gathered in a room for a quick meeting. We were given a time frame for judging, some guidelines and then we headed to the rooms to get started.

This is where it gets interesting. Our first task was to go through the applications for the Prize, which is a $12,000 commission for a Piano Trio. There were four judging rooms, 8 judges, and about 82 prize applications per room. We had to get through them all and choose our top 4-6 before dinner time. That came to about

7 hours of judging! If you do the math, that gave us roughly 5 minutes per application. Some of the pieces that people would send in were anywhere from 5-60 minutes long, and they each sent in two pieces. That is quite a task to make a judgment call after hearing a piece for only a few minutes.

I learned so many things just being the intern that was helping out and basically staying out of the way of the judges. Here are some of them.

1. Direction - where is the piece going? What are you trying to do with the material? There were so many pieces that started, but never really went anywhere, whether that was staying with the same ideas as the beginning, or being stuck on the same chord in the end as in the beginning. Everything needed to serve a purpose and to lead the listen to something else.
2. Don't be afraid to enter - there were a lot of applications that were submitted. In turn, there were a lot that were really good, but in the end, only one winner could be picked. However, one of the judges I was with was a performer. He was writing down all sorts of names and contact information because he himself wanted to play the piece or he had some students that would like to play one of the pieces. Just because there is only one winner, that doesn't mean that the remaining 325 applications go unnoticed.
3. Cleanliness really is next to Godliness - the applications that came in that were neatly bound, printed on nice paper and were very clear and clean always got a little more time with the judges. If they took the time to mark where all the tracks were and pointed the judges to places that they should look at fared a lot better than those who didn't. Though it all comes down to the music and your compositional skills, presentation was a huge part that would catch the attention of the judges in the first place.

These are just a few things that I learned. The list goes on and this post would get longer and longer, and you would be inclined to read less and less. I know that happens to me when I don't have a nice picture to take a break on.

Well, this is basically all we did for the entire day. Saying that makes it sound so boring, but it was so much fun and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I've never been so exciting about composition before in my life. I heard so many great things in one day and it sparked my imagination in so many different ways. I just hope I can produce some things that can compare to what I heard.