Works by Wooster Students Chosen for Cleveland Chamber Symphony’s ‘Young and Emerging Composers’

Compositions by College of Wooster junior and sophomore two of only six to be performed on April 5

WOOSTER, Ohio — College of Wooster music composition majors Frederick Evans, a junior from Clinton, N.Y., and Jungyoon Wie, a sophomore from Seoul, South Korea, have had works selected for performance and recording by the Grammy Award-winning Cleveland Chamber Symphony (CCS). The new works will be performed as part of the Chamber Symphony’s annual “Young and Emerging Composers” event on Thursday, April 5, at Glick Recital Hall of the Cleveland Music Settlement (11125 Magnolia Drive, University Circle) at 7:30 p.m. The performance is free and open to the public.

Evans and Wie were two of only six student composers from area colleges and universities to have been selected to participate in afternoon reading/rehearsal sessions with CCS and a symposium/discussion with Music Director Steven Smith. The day will culminate with a performance of all six works.

Evans and Wie are composition students of Jack Gallagher, the Olive Williams Kettering Professor of Music at Wooster. Evans’ new composition, titled “Pastorale for Chamber Symphony,” is “an engagingly pensive and lyrical short work incorporating florid, expressive passages for woodwinds and sensitively integrated orchestral colors,” said Gallagher. Wie’s “Flying in Winter” is “an energetic, brief, and bracing toccata exhibiting compelling rhythmic gestures and an imaginative harmonic palette,” according to Gallagher. Each work was composed during the current academic year and is the first original orchestral piece by either composer.

In addition to studies with Gallagher, Evans is a member of the Wooster Symphony Orchestra and a student of upright and electric bass with adjunct Wooster faculty member Jack Steward. Evans’ “Orange Wind,” a work for unaccompanied chorus to a text of his own devising, was performed last May by the Wooster Chorus, under the direction of Lisa Wong, assistant professor of music at Wooster. His “Sonata for Cello and Piano” was awarded second prize in the statewide 2011 Ohio Federation of Music Clubs Collegiate Composition Contest.

Wie, a violinist in the Wooster Symphony Orchestra as well as a member of the Wooster Chorus, studies piano with adjunct Wooster faculty member Frank Huang. Her setting for unaccompanied chorus of a text by Robert Southey, titled “How Beautiful is Night,” was performed numerous times by the Wooster Chorus during the Chorus’s recent Spring Tour. It is scheduled to be performed again at the Chorus’s Spring Concert on Sunday, April 29, at 3 p.m. in Gault Recital Hall of the Scheide Music Center.

Evans and Wie plan to continue composition studies through graduate school and to teach at the college level.