Composers race against the clock in 72-Hour Composition Challenge

Written by: Sophia da Silva 🇧🇷

Lily Gallihue sits front row running sound and video recording at the 72-Hour Composition Challenge (Sophia da Silva).

A typical piece of classical music can take years to write and months to rehearse before it’s heard by the public. The 72-Hour Composition Challenge crammed the process into just three days.

“It's kind of like, you know, being told to build a house and you get driven to a pile of plywood and bricks,” said senior composition major Lily Gallihue, “but it's a really fun process.”

As part of NextNOW Fest, the UMD School of Music hosts the challenge to show off the work that the Composition Department does.

After only two weeks into the semester, composers and musicians signed up to take part in the challenge. Composers then received a list of instruments to write for and submitted their choices by Tuesday evening. 

Subsequently, it was off to the races. They had 72 hours to write, send out their scores and rehearse it for their first performance on Friday night. 

“Tuesday this time, none of what you’re going to hear tonight on the concert ever existed in a thought or a memory,” stated Assistant Clinical Professor of Music Theory and Composition Johannes Visser ahead of the Friday concert.

Visser is in charge of facilitating the challenge, which he’s been doing since becoming a doctorate student at the University of Maryland. He has put a major emphasis on collaboration and connection between the composers and musicians.

“So often in the music school, the performers wouldn’t even know who the composition students are and vice versa,” said Visser. “We’re sort of trying to change that a little bit.”

The collaboration can be part of the challenge, according to senior computer science and composition major Ezra Silver-Isenstadt.

“ You're meeting with new instrumentalists, like four new people or however many people, that sometimes you've never met before, and each have their own playing style and way of working with each other,” said Silver-Isenstadt.

It’s up to the composers to make sure the performers can work together to make the piece sound right with limited time.

Gallihue told her performers, “It's 36 hours. I hope it's good, but it doesn't have to be.”

For the composers, letting go of perfectionism is the point of the challenge.

“You get so self-conscious about what you’re writing about, getting in the weeds of it and overthinking, whereas here, it’s such a short time frame and the deadline is so fast that you just kind of have to go,” said composition master’s student Aidan Wilbur.

The instinctual nature of the challenge helps composers come up with things that surprise them and even become important to their music.

“[It] helps you kind of discover what you love,” said Gallihue.

It also helps composers share that love with the rest of the UMD community.

“We just want our music to be heard,” said Wilbur.

With recent federal budget cuts affecting The Clarice, programming and publicity have fallen on the shoulders of students and faculty. Wilbur said that events like the Composition Challenge help bring attention to the work that the School of Music is doing.

Njandee Murangi came all the way from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to watch the Composition Challenge after being invited by one of the performers to a first date. As a self-described music lover, Murangi really enjoyed the concert.

“ It was really fantastic. Everything that everyone did was just so impressive,” said Murangi. 

Composition students will have more chances to share their work  at the upcoming New Music at Maryland concert and at other events later this semester.

“There is such a wealth of compositional talent in this school,” said Gallihue. “There's brand new stuff being created every month of the semester.”