In Our Midst | Composing classical on and off campus

It's 7 p.m. on a Thursday evening and, like many Tufts students, sophomore Erik Jorgensen is getting ready for a night out. The night he's preparing for, however, is not the typical Tufts Thursday of campus party-hopping - and Jorgensen is no typical student.

In fact, he's far from Medford (he's in New York City), his goal in life is to write musicals and performance art, and the event he's getting ready for is a concert at which one of his own compositions will be performed.

Twenty-year-old Jorgensen, who is spending the spring semester studying dramatic writing at NYU, is pursuing a five-year dual degree in drama (from Tufts) and classical composition (from the New England Conservatory, or NEC). Originally a jazz saxophonist, Jorgensen's victory in a composing competition at age 11 was a harbinger of things to come: now, his compositions have been commissioned and performed throughout Boston - and the world.

"My work has been performed all around the city by the Parker quartet and the Dinosaur Annex [a music ensemble], as well as at the Concert Hall of the National Music Academy of Ukraine, which has been great," Jorgensen said.

A less far-flung venue made an impression on him as well. "The 2003 Michigan Music Education Conference at the University of Michigan was good - that was my first symphony," he said.

Even though Jorgensen has come a long way since writing his first symphony, hearing his work performed remains exciting. "It's a great feeling to see others perform your stuff," he said. "It's nerve-wracking, of course, but it's interesting to see how others interpret it. I mean, I'm nothing without the performers - music on paper isn't music."

"It doesn't always come out like I heard it in my head, but that's the best part: musicians bring their own creative elements into the process," Jorgensen added. "Keep in mind that I began as a jazz musician - I'm all about the creative capabilities of the performer."

Jorgensen is also "all about" observing how audiences respond to his music. "Audience response is great - it's the second reason I do what I do," he said. "I write because I need to, but also because I like to make people happy. So when I see people having a good time with my music, it's extremely fulfilling."

"It's amazing to make other people smile, as cheesy as that sounds, which is probably why I don't write a lot of overly deep, pretentious nonsense," he added.

Instead, Jorgensen writes fresh, creative, and adventurous pieces that, he says, are intended to "surprise people, but not in a shock value way - in an 'I wouldn't have thought of that' kind of way."

For example, Jorgensen says that one of his recent compositions, "Aaponi's Destiny," is the symphonic equivalent of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.

"It's [performed by] a string quartet," he said of the piece, which earned him a write-up in the Boston Herald. "The audience votes about what a mayfly can do while in New York City."

Aaponi is a Native American word for mayfly, and the piece, Jorgensen says, was inspired by an ecology class he took while at Interlochen Arts Academy, where he spent his senior year of high school. ("Interlochen is in the middle of a national park, and class was outside every day," he said. "I'm a boy scout - I'm a sucker for that outdoorsy stuff.")

For Jorgensen, such direct inspiration is an anomaly. "When I go to write a piece, I never worry too much about 'what does this mean?' or 'what am I trying to say?'" he said. "That falls into place and is subjective - you can't force that."

Jorgensen began developing his musical instincts at a young age while growing up in the small factory town of Clinton, Iowa. ("Our biggest factory was national byproducts - they burned dead animals and turned them into glue, so our whole town smelled like that" he said.)

"I wrote my grandma a letter when I was six that said 'I've decided to write music so I can make the big bucks,' though I didn't consider it as a career option until sophomore year," he said. "Until then, I wanted to be an

astronaut."

That fateful sophomore year, Jorgensen was studying theory with his choir director in order to become better at improvising on the saxophone.

"He assigned me to write a classical choral piece," Jorgensen said. "I did and he loved it, so our choir performed it a bunch of times. Then I decided that's what I wanted to do: I loved the whole process so much - writing, rehearsing, conducting, performing - so I wrote two more pieces and applied to Interlochen and transferred to high school there."

While at Interlochen, Jorgensen founded his first publishing company, Erik Jorgensen Publications, so that he could publish his own work. Since then, Jorgensen has gone on to found a subsidiary of the original company called TYT publications, which is a theatre and performance art publishing company.

Not all of Jorgensen's endeavors, however, have been musical.

"I like making sushi - I really wanna be a sushi chef as a day job, so I do that quite a bit," he said. "At Interlochen, my roommate was from Tokyo, so he got me started and I just kept doing it. It's really therapeutic."

But then again, for Jorgensen, even the seemingly unrelated process of sushi making is linked to music composition: "It's like writing music - only you get to eat it," he said.<$>

Tentatively titled "Afraid of Heights," the musical will be the first one Jorgensen actually completes: "I've written half of about three shows!" he said.

Jorgensen is also working on an artistic installment to be displayed at MIT this spring. "There have been some problems with it lately, simply because of some funding issues -- it's an expensive project," he said. "It's a collaboration with my best friend Daniel Cunningham, who is an engineering student at MIT."

"He designed it," Jorgensen continued. "Its' basically a room with a false ceiling

made of plexiglass and hundreds of electronically triggered droppers, which drop water down onto the false ceiling. It's like your being rained on without getting wet."

"And then there is music, and the drops correspond to what's going on musically," he added. "It's this whole experience kind of thing, with lights and stuff too -- should be interesting."

As far as where he's headed after graduation? "Oh, definitely New York," Jorgensen said. "I think I'll probably go to grad school in the NYU Tisch musical theatre-writing program and try to make it in the New York scene for a while."

"I don't really see myself writing smash-hit Broadway shows, 'cause those usually suck, but working more in the off-Broadway, intimate theatre scene," he adds.