Composition is introspective spelunking, imaginative trekking, and reactionary commentary, revealed through sound expression.
-Conner Shaw
One of the participants for the Call For Scores portion of our 2017 Open Space Festival is UNC’s very own Conner Shaw. He is a Jazz Studies and Composition student at the School of Music, with guitar as his primary instrument.
Shaw says about the Open Space Festival:
[The Festival] exposes the Greeley community, university members, and guest composers to a vast spectrum of music written in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that may not have an exceptional staging and receptive audience in other settings. This festival also allows a featured guest composer to present his or her contemporary compositions to the greater public, enabling U.N.C. composers and musicians to seek out new sounds, models, and ideas.
The composer says that he is excited about the festival, which will take place March 6-10, because he is “able to interact with some of the finest composers and musicians in the world in an engaging, open forum of new music.” The festival will showcase composers from a wide variety of backgrounds and styles. Shaw says, “from this week-long immersion into sonic frontiers, I confront new ideas and broaden my fundamental understanding of music.”
We are proud to showcase a few of our own students, and are looking forward to hearing these new compositions from our UNC bears.
