On Friday, May 5, members of the Deerfield music program performed in the annual Homegrown Concert. The concert highlighted seven student composers (Andy Chen ’25, Vasu Singh ’23, Stephen Morris ’23, Lauren Mitchell ’23, Alisa Stepchuk ’23, Jackson Collins ’23, and Don Hutchinson ’23), who gave world premieres of their compositions. The concert also featured pianist Forrest Gao ’23, the winner of the annual Senior Concerto Competition.
Every student composer featured in the Homegrown Concert has taken or will take the Advanced Composition class, taught by Director of Music Tom Bergeron. The final assignment of the winter term is to create an original composition to be featured in the Homegrown Concert at the end of the year.
Mr. Bergeron expressed that students learn best when grounding themselves in the full range of a certain section. For example, a student can “ask players, ‘Can the viola play this?’ You can look at them and say, ‘Kind of!’”
For her assignment, singer and composer Alisa Stepchuk interwove two Ukrainian folk songs into a singular piece. “One [song] is about unrequited love, and the second is a military march,” she explained. “Right now, during the war, people are living their ordinary lives with explosions in the background. The main theme [about my composition] is this song about love with a military march in the background.”
Stepchuk also performed a punk-rock song in the second half of the concert. Although her song began as a means to vent her emotions, it evolved into a one-time performance featuring Vivian Wan ’25, Justin Seo ’23, and Michael Corrado ’23. She explained, “It started when I got an 85 on my orchestra piece that I worked really hard on. I was going to play [my song] after the performance and ask people if they think that I deserved that grade for my orchestra piece.” She laughed, adding, “I know I’m more than my grade.”
Singer-songwriter Lauren Mitchell ’23 performed her arrangement of an original song for orchestra. She featured her song as a pre-release track on her debut EP, “The End of My Beginning,” which she released in the fall of last year. Regarding her creative inspiration, Mitchell described, “I wrote this song [Hold On to Neverland] last May, and this was right after the Uvalde shooting in Texas. I wanted to express this idea of innocence lost and the preservation of innocence in childhood and spread awareness about school shootings.” Mitchell’s next release is underway, with a track featuring Deerfield musicians from the Advanced Chamber Music class.
Pianist and composer Andy Chen ’25 performed two movements of a dance suite, which he modeled after J. S. Bach’s Piano and Cello Suites. His inspiration traced back to the fall when Piano Teacher and Chamber Coach Yu-Mei Wei hosted “a series where we studied dance suites, which are [a collection of] dance music from four hundred years ago. These had several movements, and they were written for many instruments (usually piano) and were four to five minutes in length.” Chen performed a Sarabande and Gigue, which are the slow and fast movements that typically conclude a dance suite. He looks forward to completing his suite in the near future.
Gao, who also studies with Ms. Wei, thanked her for preparing him for the Homegrown Concert. When asked about his performance, Gao answered, “It was a very emotional experience. Ever since I heard the piece, I knew I wanted to play it for the concerto competition.” In retrospect, Gao admits that “it seems ludicrous that I had never heard of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto before [I came to Deerfield]. When I first heard the second movement my sophomore year, I was instantly wowed by how beautiful and sublime these long melodic lines were.”
As a senior, Principle French Hornist Jackson Collins ’23 grappled with the challenge of reflecting upon his past four years at Deerfield while he composed his piece. “When I was given the assignment, I was also sort of trying to handle the fact that this is over for me in a couple of weeks,” he confessed. “That’s four years of my life—four different class schedules. I went through COVID-19 while I was here, and [I was] trying to wonder, what did it mean? I couldn’t actually express that with my words, so I didn’t. I just started writing whatever came to my head.” Collins joked that his piece opens with “just a bunch of chaos, and that’s not what Deerfield is.” To “encapsulate that moment right after the Evensong or right in the middle of it,” he juxtaposed the clamorous introduction with a sweeping chorale in the middle of his piece. In the chorale, “There’s just that unity and quiet,” he describes. “There’s a collective deep breath where you sort of reset and prepare for the week.”
Drawing inspiration from the uplifting spirit of the Homegrown Concert, Collins urges students to have faith in their own capabilities. He explains, “You just don’t notice how you’re growing at Deerfield. It just sort of happens, and it’s a passive thing. By doing all of the assignments and the hard, grueling work, that builds character.”