Project 21 has recently started a new internal group for creating and performing experimental music.
Project 21 is a student organization aiming to help students develop and perform new compositions. The group contains students from a variety of majors, including students studying composition, acting and premed.
Within the organization, a smaller group of students is aiming to develop experimental music. The experimentalist group within Project 21 composes songs based around improvisation and musical hypotheses and is open to adding new members from the student body.
Dr. Edward Knight, composer in residence and the director of composition at OCU, is the faculty advisor for Project 21.
“I arrived here in 1997, and we didn’t call it Project 21 then because there were only a few composers on campus. So my mission was to recruit composers so that within five years there was a whole studio of composers. Once we had a decent number of composers, we started organizing things in a different way. It eventually became student-run, and it became a regular student organization,” said Knight.
Project 21 has a variety of performances and presentations throughout the year. The new experimentalist group focuses on more experimental ways of creating and performing music. Ben Askren, composition sophomore, is the founder and head of the experimentalist group. Askren said he believes it’s important for people to be exposed to more experimental forms of music.
“People don’t know what they want until they see it,” said Askren.
Askren said the aim of the experimentalist group is to ask questions and make hypotheses around music, experimenting with the form using elements contained within the scientific method.
Among the several pieces performed, the experimentalist group showcased a “democratic chorale,” in which Askren and Tomi Vetter, piano performance junior, developed a series of improvised chords and created a full song around them in real time. Another one of the experimentalist pieces performed was simply referred to as “Orange.” Askren invited audience members and other performers to come up, put an orange post-it note on their head, and create an improvised musical interpretation of what they felt the color orange would sound like.
Both Project 21 and the experimentalist group are open to any students willing to participate. Students interested can contact Dr. Knight for Project 21 and reach out to Ben Askren for the experimentalist group.
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