May 9, 2022

By Elizabeth Derner

Photo by Elizabeth Derner

At age 13, Holden Franklin switched from editing their saxophone parts in middle-school band pieces to writing their own music — inspired by film scores.

When Emily Shaw was 13, her piano teacher said she should write down the songs she made up and play them at recitals.

Jack Snelling went to school early when he was 13 to use computers in the band practice rooms. He wrote his first composition, “Forge,” for his band class to play, stringing together driving percussion beats and whatever sounded cool.

They lived across Missouri in Perryville, Strafford and Webster Groves.

Five years later, Franklin, Shaw and Snelling sat in Memorial Union at 11 p.m. They ate pizza and tried to make each other laugh to ease their stress. They were the only freshmen music composition majors and struggled together to meet a midnight deadline.

They were tasked with writing movements inspired by different genres of Missouri music for the Mizzou New Music Ensemble to perform at the World Chess Hall of Fame in St. Louis on May 3, 2019. Franklin finished “A Bucket and a Rag,” inspired by ragtime, Shaw finished “the girl in the pines,” inspired by classic rock and Snelling finished “City Swing,” inspired by jazz.

Looking back in 2022, some of their favorite memories are late nights composing together. They have a slew of shared memories after meeting at MU’s summer high school composition camp in 2015 and developing as composers and close friends over seven years.

As they reach the end of their senior year, Franklin has mixed club and orchestral music in a piece for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and a spectrum of emotions in a choir piece. Shaw has composed classical sound worlds inspired by everything from worms to a vintage radio while producing electronic music as an indie-pop performer on the side. Snelling has played a two-hour recital showcasing his jazz ensemble and solo piano compositions — with influences including improv jazz, classical composers, the Peanuts and his friends — while also developing his artistic voice through his geography double major.

In typical years, MU accepts two freshmen as composition majors so the department can provide individual support, ample performance opportunities and scholarships.

Composition professor Dr. Stefan Freund said Franklin, Shaw and Snelling all had strong portfolios after composing pieces at the camp every summer of high school, and the department accepted all three of them.

When they began college, the trio were a security blanket of friends to each other. The night after moving in, they got worn out at the Midnight BBQ in the Student Center and escaped to a study room upstairs. After eating Dippin’ Dots and talking together for ages, Snelling said he felt at home.

Throughout college, their friendship intertwined with their education. Shaw and Snelling ate breakfast at 7 a.m. in Mark Twain Hall and walked to Dr. Michael Budds’ American music history class together freshman year. For one of their first composition assignments, Franklin composed a supportive vocal piece, “let me help you with my broken,” for Shaw after helping her through a panic attack. Snelling and Franklin moved in together sophomore year and still live together. As composers, they bounce music ideas off of each other and check for mistakes in each other’s scores and program notes.

“Our music sounds almost nothing alike, but we both trust each other a lot and know that we’re gonna give each other honest advice,” Snelling said.

As friends, they lift each other’s moods and make fun of each other, like when Franklin plays Pokémon or Snelling just has four bottles of mustard in the fridge. Sometimes music still slips into their everyday interactions.

“We’re both just such little nerds,” Franklin said. “Last night, he just got off orchestra and walked in. We both said ‘Hi’ to each other at the same time, but we both said it long, so it became a note and we started harmonizing on ‘Hi.’ It was so stupid. Awful.”

Franklin, Shaw and Snelling have taken music classes together every semester. They’ve worked one-on-one with the same composition professors: Dr. Carolina Heredia, Dr. Yoshiaki Onishi and Freund. They’ve grown as individual composers, seen each other’s music come to life during performances in concert halls (and virtually during the pandemic) and kept a healthy environment as tight-knit friends.

Shaw said they also have different ways of tackling problems in composing, and being close makes them comfortable texting each other questions and learning from each other.

Franklin and Snelling said some of the times they’ve laughed hardest were because of Shaw and that she always looks out for the people closest to her.

“She’s a little quirky and funny in her own way,” Franklin said. “She’s a lot of fun and colorful and a great person to be around. I’ve been on vacation with her, and I love her whole family.”

Shaw and Franklin said Snelling has great hair and is funny, nonjudgmental and a good listener.

“I feel like he goes through life always listening,” Shaw said. “His brain is always on … If you watch him when we’re at a concert or something, he’ll be nodding his head. When we’re in conversation, you can tell from his facial cues that he’s just listening. He’s chill, very sweet, very funny, just a cool person. He just has a very cool outlook on the world.”

Snelling and Shaw said Franklin is effortlessly funny, authentic and supportive — and has amazing outfits.

“He’s a very buoyant, happy person,” Snelling said. “In all the time that I have known him, he has never once been anything but upfront, truthful and honest with me.”

Holden Franklin

Franklin likes the moment a song hits exactly what they’re feeling — which is usually several emotions at once.

Every year since 2017, the Mizzou New Music Initiative partners with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which selects three student applicants to compose pieces for the symphony to perform. In 2021, Franklin applied and was selected as one of the composers. They wrote “Club FOMO,” their first composition for a full orchestra.

Franklin mixed a light-hearted, club music style with dissonant chords to capture the excitement and anxiety of going out because of the fear of missing out. They thought of each instrument as a different emotion and formed them into a story.

“You’re at the club, right? There’s bass going on, there’s rhythm, there’s all different things that sound like club music, like dry hits and a really deep bass and bounce,” Franklin said. “I also want it to sound like an orchestral piece because I’m writing it for the orchestra.”

Orchestrally, they took inspiration from composers like Joe Hisaishi, John Adams and Gustav Holst. For the club aspect of the music, they were inspired by hyper-pop artists like Kim Petras and Charlie XCX.

After working on “Club FOMO” from June 2021 to January 2022, they saw the symphony perform it Feb. 16 at Powell Hall.

“It meant a lot to me,” Franklin said. “It felt like the next step in my career.”

Their professors and friends came to see it together.

“It was just so cool to see how [club-inspired music] translated to an orchestra in what is normally a classical space,” Shaw said. “I was jamming out to it. It was so good.”

Franklin’s previous compositions are based on specific stories and emotions as well. They said they compose to enhance stories rather than compose for the sake of music alone.

Throughout college, Franklin has made those stories more personal to express their deeper emotions and connect with the audience. A distinct feature of all their pieces is rich harmonies. Freund said Franklin has a wonderful ear for such harmonies because of their singing background: Franklin sang in choir in high school and now sings in MU’s University Singers and Canticum Novum, an undergraduate chamber choir.

Their sophomore year project, “Let Me Come Home,” is a memoir in the form of a string quartet piece. It translates Franklin’s mix of happy and sad emotions from the first 20 years of their life, especially after coming out as gay in a conservative, largely-Catholic town. They plan to compose new parts of the memoir every 20 years of their life.

“Sometimes I have to encourage students to be more imaginative, to try to find themselves,” Heredia said. “With Holden, it’s the opposite. He has an absolutely fluid connection with himself, so all of that comes out immediately.”

Their junior year project for the Khemia Ensemble, “humans final plea to earth,” displays their fear of climate change and passion for nature, which they’ve been surrounded by their whole life from growing up on a farm.

One of their current projects, “a lover’s endeavor,” is a choir piece they’ve gradually worked on for three years. The piece is inspired by “The Gamut,” a poem they love by Maya Angelou. In three stanzas, the poem captures a spectrum of emotions throughout one’s life as they age.

Franklin said they like the problem-solving and research involved in writing music alone, but they also love attention. Whether freelance or for a choir they can also sing with, they hope to be a famous composer in the future.

Emily Shaw

Shaw has honed in on a style that reflects her fascination with the possibilities of sounds. She’s motivated to create music she’d want to listen to — music that feels otherworldly.

“I do a lot of things that are whimsical, like something that’s a dreamlike state — something you would encounter on a slightly different world than this one,” Shaw said. “I usually focus on coming up with interesting colors and textures, creating this little world of sound. I want it to be a very immersive experience.”

In addition to composing more classical-style compositions and singing in the MU Concert Chorale, she creates and performs indie-pop music as Faerie the Kid, starting when she was 15. Her songs feature layered soft, flowy vocals and electronic sounds. She likes that she can create any sound with electronics on music softwares like Logic Pro without having to rely on other musicians to play instrumentals.

“Regardless of the genres she is working in — whether as Faerie the Kid or Emily Shaw — I genuinely appreciate how her personality shines forth in the music she creates,” Onishi said.

Her composition professors said as Shaw went through college, she explored the combination of electronic and acoustic sounds, like in her piece “Three Waltzes” for the Khemia Ensemble, inspired by the changing emotions in different parts of a day.

Shaw has also experimented with unusual sounds, especially in the piece “the things I heard on the radio.” She wrote the piece gradually over three years and worked on it with each professor.

Written for the Mizzou New Music Ensemble, “the things I heard on the radio” uses flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion and Shaw’s vocals. Some of the percussion Shaw wrote involves striking a toy piano with wire brushes, strumming inside a grand piano and turning the knob on a radio to make a clicking sound.

The ensemble performed it on Feb. 27 and will perform it again July 27 at the Mizzou International Composers Festival.

At the Feb. 27 premiere, Onishi asked Shaw pre-performance interview questions about the piece.

“What she answered blew my mind because she touched on topics that are very often discussed in the context of contemporary music, namely interstices or distances [between sounds and ideas],” Onishi said. “It was very fascinating to hear what she has to say about her music and her own aesthetic.”

Shaw said as she sang on stage, it was exciting to hear her piece come to life around her, especially after working on it for so long.

“It was really, really fantastic,” Snelling said. “I think that piece sounded the most like Emily.”

She composed a piece for violin and piano this year, “the sun spins out of place to warm you,” performed by Xiaoxiao Qiang and Wen Shen at the St. Louis concert hall The Sheldon on April 6. The title comes from a poem Shaw wrote.

Shaw also wrote “Romance of the Worms” for the Mizzou New Music Ensemble this year. The ensemble performed it at MU on April 24 and again at The Sheldon on April 3 alongside Snelling’s “City Swing.”

“Romance of the Worms” is inspired by the intuitive melodies and sounds in jazz. Its sparkly, dreamy atmosphere represents the lives and personalities of worms that Shaw imagined.

She said it was special to watch the performances and see three of her pieces performed in the same semester.

As she went through college, Shaw learned creative techniques for composing and manipulating sound. She said she’s always learning more about the idiosyncrasies of instruments and how they can produce different effects together in her compositions.

Shaw is interested in working in Foley in the future, designing and creating sound effects for films.

“Almost every idea that you come across in classical composition could be applied to sound design and sound effects because that’s the same thing,” Shaw said. “You’re hearing information and deciding how you can manipulate that information to sound a certain way.”

Jack Snelling

When Snelling was a senior in high school, he saw the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra perform Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2., and the Adagio brought him to tears. Ever since, he’s been trying to produce and experience that level of emotional investment in music again.

On April 8, he performed his senior capstone recital.

Snelling performed seven original compositions from throughout his college career. He played piano and synthesizers with a jazz ensemble on songs like “Circumference 57” and “Woodstock Walk.” In “City Lights from a Moonlight Highway,” he was accompanied by acoustic guitar and double bass. He played solo on “Summer Tune,” a piece inspired by missing his friends the summer after freshman year of college. He also improvised a song inspired by suggestions from the audience, which included using a bossa nova style and going from the key of E-flat major to D minor.

“He accomplished through that recital a whole concert of new music that was written by him, producing a concert with four horn players, drums, bass, getting all of the rehearsals together, making all the parts, organizing the times — then publicizing it to the point that he had a full house,” Freund said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Sheryl Crow Hall that full. It was a huge success.”

Snelling came to MU with a background in jazz after playing jazz piano since he was 8, and he now plays in MU’s Concert Jazz Band. Since coming to college, he’s realized jazz piano, especially improv, is what he’s most passionate about because it’s freeing and synthesizes performance and composition through coming up with music on the spot.

He’s also played bassoon since freshman year of high school and plays in the MU University Philharmonic Orchestra and Wind Ensemble.

His music reflects jazz and classical styles influenced by his background in both genres. He incorporates space for improvisation or writes improv-sounding parts in his composed pieces. When writing “City Swing,” he imagined classical ensemble instruments as part of a jazz combo — like a clarinet solo resembling a saxophone player “shredding over some changes,” Snelling said.

He loves improvisation because of how it enables more communication between musicians and instruments.

“My favorite jazz groups are the ones that are so in tune with each other and they’re always listening to each other and responding to each other,” Snelling said. “It’s those moments when the music just hits different. And for classical music, it shows up in the same way — amazing string quartets are always in communication when they’re playing.”

When he performs, he uses physical expression to communicate with the audience — because when he sees musicians like Etienne Charles smiling and enjoying themselves while playing, he feels it too.

Throughout college, his professors have encouraged him to experiment and infuse his work with his personal voice — like his signature improv, rhythms, syncopation, extended harmonies and element of fun.

“I have learned to trust myself a little bit more and trust things that I think of, rather than trying to force the things I think of into a box that sounds like someone else,” Snelling said.

Snelling said his love of geography (his other major) also tied into his music more throughout college and helped him get closer to his voice.

Humming on an October drive through the hills of Tuscumbia, Missouri, in 2020, he came up with the first notes of “Ozark Autumn,” which will soon be included on a live album by St. Louis acoustic group the 442s. His Khemia Ensemble piece, “awaken,” is inspired by Taum Sauk Mountain State Park in Missouri and imagining a sunrise awakening the Earth. The wind ensemble piece he’s currently composing is based on the feeling of going to his grandparents’ house in La Plata, Missouri.

Snelling can see himself going in several directions in the future, whether as a composer, jazz pianist or music administrator to organize concerts and support the arts. His biggest dream, however, is to combine what he loves — to find a bassist and a drummer, write music for their jazz trio and travel the country performing in concerts.

After this semester, Snelling will stay at MU for a year to finish his double major, then head to graduate school for music — hopefully in a city that also offers public transportation, another passion of his. Franklin will take a gap year, still living with Snelling, to apply to graduate school for composition — potentially in Sydney, Australia. Shaw is looking at sound design jobs in Washington, D.C. and plans to continue her independent music.

The friends said they can always count on each other no matter where they end up and are excited to see how they continue to grow.

Edited by Lucy Valeski | lvaleski@themaneater.com