Locals win Young Composers Challenge

Joseph Prior sits under bright lights of the Bob Carr Performing Arts Centre stage as a quartet of string players and a pianist rehearse his score “Reverie and Song.”

The Winter Park resident shuffles the loose-leaf pages of his score, keeping tabs on what he has written and what he hears. “Can we take that faster?” he halts the ensemble mid-song. “What if I count off?” And with his count and three flicks of his wrist in time, the music resumes.

In a small conference room backstage, Caleb Bancroft of Oviedo sits and listens as five members of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra play his piece for the first time.

He sits, suit and tie, his hands wringing the rolled score of the “Shining Brass March” he wrote, nodding his head as the melodies he crafted play out through the room.

Upon only hearing the music for this Sunday, Nov. 13, performance it could appear to the ear as just a normal rehearsal for these music professionals, but a look at the program reveals each composer on the bill was born after 1993 — Prior is 17, and Bancroft is 15.

These local teens were two of seven 13- to 18-year-old composers chosen nationally as part of the 2011 Young Composers Challenge, created by Orlando-native Steve Goldman, to have their original works rehearsed, critiqued and performed by members of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.

To learn more about the Young Composers Challenge, visit youngcomposerschallenge.com

“For these kids, it’s not just an interesting local award they won,” Goldman said. “This is a big national honor.”

The Young Composers Challenge, held annually since 2004, Goldman said, has grown from a local movement to attracting submissions from across the United States.

“I guess no one had ever really thought that this would be something worthwhile, having professionals play kids’ pieces, because I think people really underestimate how good some of these kids are,” Goldman said.

Crafting local talent

This year, he said the judges of the challenge, including music and composition professors from Full Sail University, Rollins College and the University of Central Florida, selected the seven winners from 45 score entries from 13 different states.

“For these two local kids to have placed is really quite amazing,” Goldman said. “They’re both very talented local musicians. I’m proud that we’re doing so well in Central Florida that these two kids are able to compete nationally.”

Both Caleb Bancroft and Joseph Prior are homeschooled and compose in their free time not spent on schoolwork or playing in the Greater Orlando Homeschool Band.

Prior, who is a second-time winner of the challenge, having placed last year with his piece “Dance Royale,” said he’s been composing music since he was 12 and playing the French horn since he was 7 years old.

His mother, Rebecca Prior, said Joseph has had music around him forever, from his father playing guitar to lull him to sleep as a baby, to Joe humming constantly as a child. He started on the French horn when he tagged along for his older sister’s beginning band class. On a whim he tried it out, and the rest is history.

“I guess it kind of chose me,” he said with a smile and a shrug.

Bancroft, who has been playing saxophone for five years, said he was equal parts surprised and excited when he learned that he won a spot in the Young Composers Challenge.

“It was the first piece I’d ever wrote,” he said. “I mean I thought maybe I had a pretty good shot, but I was still surprised that I won.”

After attending a workshop sponsored by the Young Composers Challenge earlier in the year, Bancroft said he began self-teaching himself the art of composing through books and online.

“When he gets interested in something, he’ll pretty much go all out,” his mother, Cheryl Bancroft, said. “And that’s what he’s done with composing.”

Making music

Christopher Wilkins, the music director and conductor of the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra who helped rehearse the Young Composers Challenge pieces, said he was very impressed with the skill and stylistic nuances in both Prior and Bancroft’s works.

Both Bancroft, a woodwind player who composed a brass quintet, and Prior, a brass player who wrote a string quintet, went out of their own instrument families for their works.

“Both of their pieces had a very distinct American quality to them,” Wilkins said. “Joe and Caleb both, particularly, showed the ability to be able to pick up on styles of music and recreate and invent them.”

Both Goldman and Wilkins said the local pair, as well as all other participants in the challenge, have a bright future in front of them. They said many former participants have used the recordings made during the Young Composers Challenge Composium to help them gain entrance to various prestigious music conservatories.

“You don’t too often get to change lives as a regular aspect of what you do,” Wilkins said. “But the Young Composers Challenge has been doing that for years.”