Last weekend, Rein Vaska ’25 and Nathan Liang ’25 brought their senior music composition theses to life in Chapin Hall, presenting original works shaped by years of study and experimentation. The performances, which drew inspiration from sources as varied as the AIDS crisis, the California wildfires, and celestial objects, marked the culmination of the students’ work as music majors. A third thesis, composed by Jacob Fanto ’25, will debut on April 25 with the Berkshire Symphony.

Music majors wishing to pursue a thesis have three options: They may produce a research paper on music theory, perform an honors recital, or compose an original work. Vaska, Liang, and Fanto all chose to pursue the latter.

 “For a student composer, [the composition] represents a kind of capstone project where they can set a big goal to write something that is in some way either longer or more complex than anything they’ve written before,” Associate Professor of Music Zachary Wadsworth told the Record. Wadsworth was heavily involved with all three of this years’ composition theses, advising both Liang and Fanto, and co-advising Vaska alongside Professor of Music Ileana Perez Velazquez.

Vaska’s thesis, a contemporary song cycle titled Wishbone, was performed on Friday night in Chapin Hall. The song cycle — a collection of short pieces similar to an album — featured vocals and classical instruments like the violin, cell, flugelhorn, and saxophone, while also incorporating rock band instruments, Vaska explained.

The combination ultimately created a modern sound, he explained. “This project is the first big composition thing I’ve done,” Vaska said. “I have not done a lot of writing out the music for a big group before.” 

Vaska based Wishbone on Richard Siken’s poetry collection Crush, setting Siken’s poem to an original score. “[Crush] is about how [Siken’s] boyfriend died from AIDS, and it’s a kind of exploration of loss and grief, but also the transforming power of love, and how it can be used to bring hope,” Vaska said. “It’s a very beautiful book, very weird and strange and human. So I basically just took different poems and set them to different kinds of songs that I felt conveyed the storytelling arc of the book.”

Vaska had a clear idea of the performers he wanted for his piece. “I knew very early on who was going to be in it,” he said. “I reached out to people basically a year ago. A lot of these musicians are people that I’ve played with in jazz combos before, so I know how they play. But ideally, it’s not so personal that it would be weird for other people to play.”

On Saturday night, Liang staged Those Who Favor Fire — an experimental classical piece written to incorporate instruments, electronics, and voice. The two-movement piece required 18 musicians to perform, including several choral singers directed by Choir Director Anna Lenti.

Recent climate disasters, particularly wildfires, inspired Liang to create Those Who Favor Fire. “There was this day in San Francisco where the ash from wildfires in Canada, Washington, and Northern California all converged over the city, and I woke up and it was as dark as night,” he said. “It was a very striking, apocalyptic image, and that became the inspiration for the beginning of this piece… The first movement ends with a list of every wildfire in 2020 that was in California.”

The second movement of Liang’s piece was inspired by his interest in glaciology and his travels to Iceland. “I got a grant, luckily, to go to Iceland over the summer, and I recorded a bunch of sounds there and interviewed a bunch of composers who were also writing music at the intersection of environmentalism,” he said. Liang incorporated samples recorded from the glaciers in the electronic parts of the score. 

While the two theses were principally the work of Vaska and Liang, they required collaborative effort from dozens of others — fellow music students, faculty, friends, and bandmates. “There is such a spirit in the music department … where students are willing to donate their time for this thing,” Wadsworth said. “It takes a village, and everyone has to kick in some time, but it really is an amazing thing when it all comes together.”

Fanto wrote his piece for the Berkshire Symphony, whose concerts are scheduled in advance of the academic year. As a result, the final performance had to be scheduled for April 25 — the next time the Symphony is set to perform.

Fanto’s thesis, Sungrazer, is a one-movement orchestral piece. As an environmental science concentrator, Fanto said that he often draws musical inspiration from natural phenomena. “I was inspired by a type of comet called a sungrazer that ventures perilously close to the Sun at its nearest orbital point,” he said. “I found that it mirrored the story of Icarus… They break apart and disintegrate because of the gravitational forces and the heat that’s coming from the sun, so this faded journey happens right above our heads, and I just thought it was a really inspiring concept.”

The conceptual and methodological breadth of the three theses reflect the spirit of the composition, Wadsworth explained. “I think each [thesis] is very different,” he said. “That’s the beauty of a composition thesis. Like any creative work, it really expresses what’s in someone’s art and in their musicianship.”

[Juno Pelczar, a member of Liang’s thesis choir and an executive editor at the Record was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.]