Composition Program Addresses – The camp which I called

The camp, which I called Young Women Composers Camp started with a relatively simple idea: a week-long program for high school students in Philadelphia organized by Temple University’s Boyer College of Music. Eventually, I got the idea to offer a summer composition program for young non-binary female and male composers. In the fall of 2017, I created the Young Women Composers Camp website to promote the program, and the following spring we began accepting applications online. Our 2021 program, which will take place virtually in July, will feature former faculty members Inti Figgis-Vizueta and Flannery Cunningham, new faculty member Bahar Royai, guest composer Courtney Bryan, and regular ensembles and Play, Mazumal and Peridot Duo. To develop a truly inclusive program, I also decided that we would not charge a fee and would not require students to have any training or experience in composition. I wanted to do something for the next generation of young composers, to give them extra support and help them work in a more diverse field of musical composition. She was named Yamaha Music Educator 40 Under 40 2021 for “her” pioneering efforts to create, plan and implement a camp for young women composers. We hope to launch other programs, such as a virtual mentoring program and a year-round composition studio for high school students in Philadelphia. While non-binary students have been directly invited to participate in the program since its inception in 2018, the name of our organization does not make this inclusion obvious. I continued to study and write, and when it came time to think about college and a career, I knew I wanted to study music composition. Many students wrote their first composition in the field, and all 18 received their first professional creation and recording. We conducted several anonymous student evaluations throughout the program and received extremely positive feedback, as well as many helpful suggestions that we were able to implement throughout the program. The high school students were able to hear directly from college students what it was like to study composition at a university, and the college students were able to have an informal mentoring experience.