Music commissions are where you hire a composer to make a piece of music. They provide a wonderful way for music departments to express themselves.
“You could think of it as, you wanna get senior photos so you call visual artists, that’s a photographer, to take pictures of you. Well with a music program we commission a composer to write music for us,” the high school music teacher Andre Wilkins said.
The high school has commissioned two pieces of music. The first piece was started a few years ago and was for both highschool and middle school concert bands called the Monarch March. They commissioned it so that both bands could play together while the middle school students played a piece that was at their level, and the high school students could play at their level. Dr. Ben Justice, the composition professor over at Western Colorado University, made the piece. Both parts, the middle and high school, are played at the same time.
“It’s a great way to allow students that might be behind the grade level to have a part they can be successful and contribute positively,” Wilkins said.
The second piece was commissioned by the other music directors in the district as well as Wilkins: Salida Middle School music teacher Katie Oglesby and Longfellow Elementary School music teacher Jennifer JanJoulio. It’s an Elementary choir level piece in honor of Sarah Dreyer, who was the music teacher over there for a long time before her passing. They chose a composer out of Colorado Springs named Bethany Myer, who had done other pieces for the high school choir before. She uses a technique called word cloud, where you take words associated with a person. They asked Dreyer’s former students at the high school for words that they associated with her to make the word cloud. She used this to make a piano part, melody and countermelodies.
It can take anywhere from two years or six months to get a piece commissioned. Once you commission a piece of music, it is available for purchase on the composer’s website, and it is music that can be purchased and played by anyone.
“We get to be a part of that,” Wilkins said, “We just contributed to it. So I think that is pretty cool that we’re a part of that. It wouldn’t have existed without our students striving for this goal and the support financially from the Walden Chamber music.”
Band music tends to be a bit more expensive as each instrument needs its own part, and the cost of both commissions was around 1,500 dollars. The Walden Chamber gave the high school a grant to make the choral piece in honor of Dreyer.
Music commissions can take a while to be finished, and longer still to be memorized, but the final result has been worth it, in the high school’s experience. They’ve added to the pool of music from this era, and been able to participate in creating a piece of music never seen before.
