Motivated by the desire to give students of composition at American colleges, conservatories, and universities the best possible chance to hear their own music, and to have quality recordings of their works to use in the advancement of their careers, a team of professional composer mentors and musicians has designed a new project that is coming to your town: Your Music Bus! Founded by Lisa Bielawa
, Pamela Stein Lynde and Aaron Jay Kernis, Your Music Bus is a service-oriented ensemble of flexible size and instrumentation that comes through town on dedicated student readings tours. A visit from Your Music Bus can be as simple as a coaching session with a professional mentor for a student ensemble as they read student works, or it can be a full residency including a sinfonietta-size ensemble reading and recording session, with conductor and composer mentors and master classes, at the host school. The main criterion is that the activities of the Your Music Bus ensemble center exclusively around music written by students. The founders of Your Music Bus are composers and performers with long track records of working with young composers and creating new works. Collectively, they have taught composition at many of the country’s leading institutions, including Yale School of Music, Eastman School of Music and UC San Diego, the New York Youth Symphony Making Score program, and the Minnesota Orchestra Composers Institute, founded by Kernis. They serve together on the board of the internationally-renowned MATA Festival of young composers in NYC, of which Bielawa is one of the founders. The musicians who will journey across the region on Your Music Bus include members of vital regional new music groups with some of the brightest young professional musicians around. Though all of them actively tour and perform with their own groups, their work with Your Music Bus will be dedicated entirely to your students’ works, and to sharing their combined professional expertise with school communities.
