The Annual Undergrad Composition Concert held in Drinko Hall on Feb. 12 provided a stage for eight student composers at Cleveland State University to present their musical works.
The yearly concert is always organized by the students. This year’s performance was arranged by senior Khalil Cormier and junior Derek Zebrowski.
Cormier performed a solo clarinet piece and Zebrowski observed his composition performed by a quartet of saxophones. The student composers take charge of gathering other undergraduate musicians to play the music, or in some cases, obtaining recordings to be played as backing to performed pieces, Zebrowski explained.
“The sky is the limit as to what we can do here,” Zebrowski said. “It’s how much work the composer wants to put into it. It’s always interesting to see what ensembles are brought in.”
The show began at 7 p.m. and held an audience of roughly 30 people. Before the audience filed into the auditorium, the first group was setting up their gear. And before the performance, the students had a two-hour rehearsal to warm up, Cormier said.  The groups set up their instruments, played and tore down quickly enough that all the acts could be heard within an hour.
The student’s compositions consisted mostly of classical pieces and jazz numbers. The first performance, written by sophomore John Polace, was a jazz number.
“I feel like there’s not enough jazz representation at these [concerts],” Polace said, “so I wanted to do a straightforward modern jazz piece.”
The piano dominated most of the classical renditions, but some, like Joshua Estok’s “I Wish…,” had none. Estok’s composition consisted strictly of glockenspiel, marimba and vibes.
Jimmie Parker drew notable attention while playing his jazz piano piece, “North Fairmount.” Junior Owen Barba, leaned over the upper level balcony for a better look at Parker as his fingers slammed out note after note with a prerecorded backtrack. Parker didn’t seem to notice anything but the sound sizzling out of the piano as his 
head bobbed to the beat.
“Jimmie is a beast,” Barba said. “He is a monster. He has that mix between playing with a lot of taste and a lot of feeling, and he is a gospel guy. He started playing in church so he has the most ridiculous chops in the world.”
Khalil Cormier, one of the undergraduates who organized the concert, was the only one to perform a multi-media piece. His avant garde composition, titled “Timer,” consisted of a clarinet, a 4-minute-and-48-second countdown clock on a projector and an electric hum in B-flat. He tuned the entire piece to B-flat because that is the same tuning as “the industrial hum” that electronic technology makes, Cormier explained.
“The idea behind it,” Cormier said, “is while I’m playing clarinet it is all improvised. But I’ve made it so over time the clarinet becomes more distant from the electronic piece until it comes back around to being completely harmonious again.”
By using the circle of fifths, he wanted to show the “perceived harmony” and the “distance” between the clarinet and the electronic hum as something “imaginary.” Cormier added that this was “symbolic of how we get really upset at our technology, starting at a point of harmony where we are excited for our device and over time we get frustrated by the little things and that builds up until we come back around and forgive those types of things.”
Without this background knowledge, Cormier’s trance-like tune would appear to consist mostly of silence. At several points, the audience was left with only a hum and the ticking timer. The final 30 seconds of the piece, observable through the countdown projected on the screen, was dead air leading up to— nothing.
“In composition, you can do whatever you want really,” Cormier said.