KMOX - News Radio 1120
February 5, 2010
4:32

Jeanne Sinquefield was interviewed today at 8:40 A.M. on “Total Information AM” by  hosts Debbie Monterrey and Doug McElvein.

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What is the Mizzou New Music Initiative?

“It started about five years ago.  We decided to have a competition for your composers, K-12.  And the result was overwhelming.  They come to Mizzou.  They get a cash prize, their school gets a cash prize and these young composers crawled out of the woodwork.  So we added a high school summer camp.  The only one in the country.  And they came out of the woodwork.  Then the college students started ragging “what about us?”  So going forward we are going to have eight full undergraduate rides for young composers.  A full four year scholarship, room and board at Mizzou.  This summer we’re having a college summer camp for the best young composers in the world at Mizzou.  And we had hundreds of applications.”

What kind of music are we talking about?

For K-12 it’s pretty much anything the kids come in with.  We have beautiful what you might call classical, symphonic music, we have pop, rag, rock.  And then in the college area we have stuff from ragtime to classical this year.  We have something called the Sinquefield Prize for kids to apply for at Mizzou.  This year its won by a guitarist.  He’s writing a concerto for guitar.

What we’re trying to do is make Mizzou a mecca for composition.  In every other area there’s huge focus, but not in composition.

Do you find there is a huge demand for this, especially since a lot of schools have cut music programs because of funding issues, but obviously a lot of kids are still interested in pursuing it?

Each year that we’ve done the K-12, we get more applicants…and the talent is overwhelming.  I had a 16 year old who wrote an entire symphony in ten days because she heard it in her head and just wrote it down.  We did a documentary in 2008 called Genius Among Us and every young composer we talked to had the same thing.  You’d ask them about composition and they’d say “I hear it in my head.”

What does the calendar look like for this whole thing?

For K-12 they have to submit it by first of January.  And then they come to Mizzou and preform their pieces here in March.  For the college stuff, the kids are applying for these full rides in the fall.  For summer camp the application is over for this year, but every year we are going to be having these things. 

Click here to find it on the KMOX website.

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