Associate Professor Todd Coleman and student Alex Schmidt are making beautiful music under challenging circumstances.
Sophomore Alex Schmidt was making great progress in his first music composition course when spring semester took an abrupt turn due to the coronavirus. He was composing a piece for bassoon and piano, titled “Bassoon Blower,” and was impressing his professor, Todd Coleman, with his talents.
Schmidt is a music production and recording arts major from Hudson, Ohio, and plays the piano and viola. He says his career goal is to “make music for concert halls, films, video games, TV, musicals and operas, alongside writing books.”
To keep Schmidt’s progress in the composition class on track, Coleman set up a plan to continue weekly “face-to-face” meetings via Webex to teach compositional techniques, discuss Alex’s work in progress and provide feedback for edits and revisions.
The two are sharing music via the music notation software program Sibelius. Avid (the maker of Sibelius and Pro Tools), has made free licenses of their software temporarily available for students due to the COVID-19 situation.
Coleman explains that teaching music via online instruction is a challenge. Listening to and making music together works best in-person. But Coleman and Schmidt are making the best of this temporary arrangement. “Alex is doing wonderful work,” Coleman says. “I expect him to continue to grow at a rapid rate in the coming semesters.”