Young Composers Competition Winners

Hannah Wolkowitz, now 17, composer and classical saxophonist, lives in Chesterfield, Missouri, and is a junior at Parkway Central High School. As a composer, Hannah was selected as a 2023-2024 fellow for the Luna Lab Composition Program where she is composing a piece to be premiered by the Kronos Quartet. In 2023, Hannah won the top prize in the University of Missouri’s Creating Original Music Project competition. In 2022 and 2023, Hannah composed two prize-winning pieces at Indiana University’s Composition Academy.

As a saxophonist, Hannah performed at the U.S. Navy Band’s International Saxophone Symposium (2023 & 2024) and performed alongside the band in 2023. She has also won numerous concerto competitions in 2022 and 2023, including those held by the University of Illinois-Springfield, the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the Alton Symphony Orchestra, and the U.S. Navy Band (3rd place). Hannah has been first chair in the All-Suburban Honors Band for the past five years, second chair in the All-State band for the past three years, and is the saxophonist in a St. Louis Klezmer band.

Hannah was a competitive gymnast for ten years but now enjoys focusing her time on her music, spending time with her family, and doing CrossFit.

Who knew a teeny-tiny fuzz-ball could kill millions of people? They Are All Gone tells the story of COVID. The piece starts with a kick drum solo, mimicking a steady heartbeat, and leads into a flowing, eerie stage of warning. The heartbeat quickens into worry. Quickly, the concern escalates into full-blown panic, with a recurring COVID, or “monster” motif, screaming through the chaos. The whirlwind dies down into a heartbeat, slower than before, which spills into a section of mourning, still attached to the “monster” motif. The piece solemnly ends with the slowing and permanent silence of the heartbeat.

Although life has regained most of its normality, COVID's effects on each of us will never leave. Remembering the grief the entire world felt as millions passed away from this virus is vital. Without the loss of life, we cannot fully understand how blessed we are to have a life to live. This piece is dedicated to all who have died from COVID, families of those who have died from COVID, and the rest of us, who have experienced it.

Winston F. Schneider (b. 2007), is an international award-winning young American composer. He's received an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Honorable Mention Award, and now has 35 composition wins to his name across the U.S. and Europe, including MTNA, NAfME, NFMC and Sempre Musick. He was a MATA Jr. composer. He had his debut of an 11-minute full orchestra work with a professional orchestra when he was 12, a work he wrote at age 10. He was the youngest composer ever to be in Curtis Institute of Music’s summer program.

He’s written music that’s been premiered in NYC, Philadelphia, Dallas, Cleveland, Omaha and more. He's had commissions and premieres by the Grammy-nominated Omaha Symphony, the Grammy Award-winning New York Youth Symphony, the Steamboat Symphony Orchestra, Face the Music (NYC’s premiere youth ensemble), and more.

With early abilities of perfect pitch, transposing in his head, and sometimes, for fun, simultaneously playing piano with each hand in a different key with his eyes closed, Schneider began composing at age 5. He’s a pianist and cellist, and was named Outstanding Performer of 2023 for Global Musical Arts for piano. He studies at the Omaha Conservatory of Music, and is a home-schooled sophomore. You can follow him on social media @winstonfschneider.

Salt Creek Tiger Beetle Quintet was inspired by the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle, an endangered species that is one of the rarest insects in the world. They’re only found on the sandy banks of the Salt Creek in my home state of Nebraska. These brown and green insects are about a half-inch long, and are some of the fastest insects in the world.

I've always been fascinated by Insects, Arachnids, and other crawling Arthropods. I've caught, studied, and released over 100 different species of these creatures. They’ve been the inspiration for a substantial amount of my pieces. One of the first pieces I composed, when I was 5, was called “Cicada named Fada.”

For several years, the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha (my hometown) has been breeding, hatching and releasing Salt Creek Tiger Beetles into their native habitat in order to help their species survive. In 2016, when I was 8, I toured the zoo’s labs, and it was fascinating to see the work they were doing to help the Salt Creek Tiger Beetle.

I hope you enjoy Salt Creek Tiger Beetle Quintet.

Jack Damon is 17 years old and studies composition with Dr. Ira Taxin, cello with Fred Sherry, and piano with Adelaide Roberts at the Juilliard Pre-College. He is a cellist in the Grammy Award-winning New York Youth Symphony Orchestra, as well as a student composer and conducting apprentice in the same organization. Prior to living in New York, Jack studied cello and music theory at the Conservatoire de Boulogne-Billancourt in France and composition with the John Adams Young Composer’s Program in Berkeley, California. Jack is currently a Fellow with Concerts for Compassion, a non-profit organization that provides music education and benefit concerts for refugees. In his spare time, Jack enjoys collecting CD’s, reading scores and studying languages.

Very few pieces I have ever written have come to me as naturally as this one did. Electric Prisms, based on the eponymous painting by 20th-century Ukrainian-French artist Sonia Delaunay, originally stemmed out of my desire to simply write fast, thrilling, and fun music while avoiding both making the music minimalistic (as is so tempting for fast music), and having a slower middle section that is so often used as to become cliché. The first five measures immediately lay out every single harmonic and rhythmic motif in the piece: the figure of two 16th notes then an 8th, the figure of two descending 8th notes, the flurries of 32nds, my liberal use of quartal and non-functional diatonic harmony, and the rhythmic motif of quarter note + 8th note + quarter + 8th in measures four and five. The music plays around, develops, builds and finally suddenly hits a brick wall. Where one would expect a sudden slower section, the forward momentum instead continues. At its most quiet, an atonal fugue begins, building into a triumphant horn melody. The music hits another brick wall with only the clarinet remaining holding long notes, but the piece ends quickly and loudly in a surprise Presto.

Zhengtao Pan was born in 2003 and grew up in Shanghai, China. He is currently studying Jazz Composition and Compostion at Berklee College of Music. He has scored several games and film projects. His commerical game works include "Mist Sequence," "Lost Soul Aside," "One Piece: The Bloodline" etc. He is also responsible for outsourcing music for some game companies such as Byte Dance, Masaya Games, miHoYo Co., Ltd etc. He has also produced and written songs for different game, TV, and animation series. His music has been selected as best large instrumental composition in the Jazz Education Network, Top 20 in the Lei Cine Scoring Project, and Top 20 in the Call for the Scores by the Film Scoring Academy of Europe. Recently he has been selected as the winner of Downbeat Student Award for small ensemble composition and the winner of Young Musician International Competition “Citta’ di Barletta”. Besides scoring, he arranges jazz tunes for jazz orchestra and bands, and writes concert music as well. Several of his concert music were premiered by the HyperCube ensemble, and Cascadia Composers. His music is performed by Grammy Winning Artist Steven Feifke’s Bigband in Newyork. He believes every note functions as a tool to help him express his identity.

He has also collaborated with Budapest Scoring Orchestra, Budapest Jazz Orchestra, US Jazz Ambassadors, European Recording Orchestra and New York Philharmonic among others.

Woodwind Quintet No.1 is a piece that has three movements, shows the composer’s imagination in the sphere of birds' chirp and singing, and in the life of birds. He gave the title “Bird Dance,” “Bird Waltz” and “Bird In Dreamland” to these three movements.

The composer uses shifting meters, and few extended techniques to emulate the bird’s sound in the nature. His harmonic language is influenced by Impressionism music and late 20th century contemporary music. He tries to keep this piece sounds modern but also tonal, memorable and lyrical at the same time.