Graduate students studying music performance have the chance to play world premiere pieces thanks to the MU New Music Ensemble.

Music enthusiasts showed up at 8 p.m. Monday to support the group at the second performance of the 2011-12 concert season. The group’s members showcased their own talent as performers as well as the creativity of several student composers at MU.

The ensemble is a graduate assistantship program and is funded through the support of the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. The group’s six members are flautist Young Kim, clarinetist Stephanie Berg, cellist Matthew Pierce, violinist David Snow, percussionist Ryan Borden and pianist Renata Tavernard. The ensemble is directed by Stefan Freund. Guest composers for the performance included MU students Christopher Baumgartner and David Witter.

One of the works premiered at Monday’s performance was “Motivic Motivations” by freshman Haley Myers.

“I wrote ‘Motivic Motivations’ as a project for composition class, which is taught by Dr. Freund,” Myers said. “The assignment was to write a piece focused on motivic development, which is taking a musical motif, or idea, and developing in various ways throughout the course of the piece.”

Because one of its main objectives is premiering works composed by MU students and faculty, the New Music Ensemble provides these composers with an opportunity to actually hear their music being played.

“They decided to perform it for this concert, which I was very excited about,” Myers said.  “In my limited experience, it is the most amazing thing as a composer to get to go through the process of writing a piece, hearing it rehearsed and then performed, so this has been a wonderful experience.”

Myers, whose primary instrument is the piano, said the music program at MU has had a large influence on her career as a composer.

“I didn’t start writing for instruments other than piano until I attended the Summer Composition Institute at Mizzou after my freshman year of high school,” Myers said. “These experiences with the composition program at Mizzou were what made me choose to study music here.”

The performance also featured Witter utilizing a style of conducting called “soundpainting”.

“How this works is that the members of the ensemble will not be reading any sheet music, we’ll just be watching him,” Snow said. “He is going to do a series of gestures, and we have to follow everything he does.”  

“Let There Be Light”, a piece by MU visiting scholar Kyung Soon Chang, was also featured.

Works by Steven Stucky and John Adams, two contemporary composers, were performed by the ensemble as well.

“The reason we chose pieces by Steven Stucky and John Adams is because they are extremely well-known living composers whose work has been published in the same way that Mozart’s and Brahms’s music is published,” Snow said. “Since the members of the ensemble are all performance majors, this is an opportunity for us to play works that have become standards among the new music repertoire by accomplished professional composers.”

The New Music Ensemble’s next performance will be 7 p.m. March 4 in Whitmore Recital Hall.