New Music Program Established

For more information contact:
Laura Slay, President
Slay & Associates
314-504-0081 or lslay@slayandassociates.com

For Immediate Release:

SINQUEFIELD CHARITABLE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHES
NEW MUSIC PROGRAM AT UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI

COLUMBIA, MO, March 9, 2009 -- Dr. Jeanne Sinquefield, who started the yearly Creating Original Music Project (COMP) with the University of Missouri School of Music in 2005 with a gift from the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, is donating $1 million in the next four years to create a new music program focusing on composition at the university's music school.

With an ultimate goal of making Columbia a center for music composition, Dr. Sinquefield is establishing a new program at the university that complements COMP, a statewide project that gives students in grades K-12 the opportunity to write original works in diverse musical styles. Levels of competition and accepted categories of music, such as fine art, popular, jazz, folk and sacred, are based on students' grade levels.

"We are grateful to receive this generous donation from Dr. Sinquefield and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation," said Dr. Robert Shay, director of the University of Missouri's School of Music. "The addition of a program designed to encourage gifted students to test their creative mettle in music composition is exciting news for the entire university and devotees of new music everywhere."

Full scholarships will be awarded to undergraduate students majoring in composition. The new program will include the creation of an ensemble for new music, offering assistantships or scholarships on the master's degree level for performers of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, piano, French horn and trumpet, as well as in conducting and for a publicity/business coordinator.
Additionally, the donation will include funding new faculty and staff and extension courses, as well as film development and a roster of visiting speakers.

"I am excited about the possibilities this program will bring to the University of Missouri's School of Music," said Dr. Sinquefield. "While it may seem a stretch to mention Columbia in the same category as such new music bastions as Paris, Vienna and New York City, who would have thought years ago that Santa Fe would join the ranks of the world's top opera sites? We are limited only by our imagination and the amount of hard work we are willing to invest to achieve our dreams."

Dr. Sinquefield and her husband, retired fund manager Rex Sinquefield, set up the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation in 2005 to support a variety of charitable interests and causes. Headquartered in Osage County, Missouri, the foundation has a history of supporting organizations that enhance music, art and education. Dr. Sinquefield greatly values the life-long benefits of exposure to music. Her passion for music comes alive each season as a bassist in the Columbia Civic Orchestra, the 9th Street Philharmonic Orchestra in Columbia and the Jefferson City Symphony Orchestra.

Dr. Sinquefield received her MBA and Ph.D. in demography from the University of Chicago. She serves on the steering committee for the University of Missouri-Columbia and has been recognized by UMC president Gordon Lamb as one of the "Missouri 100" for her service to and work with the university.

MU COMP Summer Camp

MU's COMP Summer Camp made the Columbia Missourian:

'Genius Among Us’ follows young composers at MU camp

Tuesday, January 6, 2009 | 5:05 p.m. CST

BY RICKY O'BANNON

COLUMBIA — Do you hear music in your head?

Many of us might wake up whistling a song heard on the radio or maybe a particularly catchy jingle. For those gifted with the mind of a composer, it’s a little different. The music they hear in their head is their own, and as a locally shot documentary "Genius Among Us" shows, that gift is not age-specific.

The film follows several Missouri high school students who spent a week this past summer at an MU camp dedicated to music composition. The camp is a part of the Creating Original Music Project that is sponsored by an annual donation from the Sinquefield Family Foundation.

“I always wondered, ‘Where does the music come from?’” said Jeanne Sinquefield, a musician and arts patron in the Columbia area, who was interviewed in the documentary. “Then you talk to these kids, and they sort of all say the same thing: I hear it in my head.”

The documentary was shot by Sinquefield’s son, Randy Sinquefield, an MU graduate and film producer based in Los Angeles.

“She called me and played a piece that one student had written and then told me he was only 15,” Randy Sinquefield said. “I thought, ‘You got to be kidding me.’” Sinquefield and his crew are, by trade, feature filmmakers who released the 2005 "What’s Up, Scarlet?"

The original plan was to film the end of the week concert where the newly composed pieces of music were performed by an ensemble of volunteers. However, Sinquefield said that he realized this was something other people would want to see and decided to expand the project into the week-long documentary.

There is a definite appeal in watching young, high school composers dedicate themselves to writing music at a surprisingly advanced level. The feeling is reminiscent of watching the Olympic Games only to realize that a teenage gymnast with a fraction of your life experience has won a gold medal for her country.

“As feature filmmakers, we didn’t know what to expect when we started shooting,” Sinquefield said. “But as we shot, it became more and more evident where we wanted to go.”

Over the course of the week, he and his crew shot upward of 120 hours of raw footage.

“In some ways,” Sinquefield explained, “It is more difficult because you can’t miss a shot. It’s not like you can ask them to do another take.” He added that the real challenge was figuring out how to put it all together during the several months of post-production.

The documentary features interviews with several of the students who make up, as Sinquefield termed it, the spine of the film. Interwoven between are live performances of all 10 pieces composed at the camp.

Sinquefield added that some of his favorite moments during the editing were those “happy accidents” when the music lined up perfectly with the on-screen footage as if it had been written specifically for the documentary.

A theme that emerges in the film is the value of the rare opportunity the camp provided for the students to meet composing peers at an age when clique identity is part of the developmental process.

“We’re all music geeks, which has kind of made us bond,” said Columbia native David Smith, 18, in an on-screen interview.

“The first COMP we had, none of the kids had met another composer,” Jeanne Sinquefield said in the documentary. “In almost every other activity children do in high school and middle school, you have a lot of other people doing it. The young composers are just sort of out there in a vacuum.”

Watching the documentary as various personalities emerge, it is impossible to forget that the high school students are, in fact, kids. However, it becomes immediately clear that these composers are more driven than others their age. William McKinney, MU professor of music theory and a director at the camp, related the story in the film of how the students decided independently to wake up an hour earlier so that they could spend more time writing music.

“If you think in terms of high school students,” McKinney said, “saying we’re going to get up at 6 o’clock in the morning so they could work longer, to me that’s kind of a phenomenal situation."

One of the composers, 17-year-old Joel Nisbett of Rolla, explained what drives him to write music. “Music is very powerful. You can affect people emotionally, spiritually and physically,” Nisbett said. “It’s fun to be able to sit down and write something that can really affect people (and that they can) connect with.”

“Genius Among Us” has finished post-production and has been submitted for consideration to several film festivals including the Columbia-based True/False Film Festival. The film won "Award of Merit" at the 2008 Accolade Film Festival.

“It far exceeded every one of our expectations,” Randy Sinquefield said of his experience making the documentary about “quirky, intelligent kids.”

“I can’t express how humbling it all was,” he said. “I was not that ambitious when I was 15.”

Deadline is Today

For those interested, the deadline for submission is today, January 5, 2009.

Everyone is eagerly awaiting to see the amazing pieces submitted!

2008 Winners

The winners are listed by category.

K-5 Song with Words

Carolyn Clamm, Briarcliff Elementary, Kansas City, MO--1st Prize

Debbie Stinson’s 5th Grade Class, Mark Twain Elementary, Brentwood, MO--2nd Prize

Farley Nichole Burke and Josiah John Prenger, Shepherd Blvd. Elementary, Columbia, MO--3rd Prize

K-5 Instrumental Music

Cooper Epstein, Captain Elementary, St. Louis, MO--1st Prize

Sage Freter, Rolla Middle School,Vichy, MO--2nd Prize

Nicholas Orazio, Fairview Elementary, Columbia, MO--3rd Prize

6-8 Song with Words

Isaac Baker, Ross Menefee, Nicholas Roberts, Austin Culbertson, Two Mile Prairie and Lange Middle School, Columbia, MO--1st Place

6-8 Instrumental

Maya Cutkosky, West Junior High, Columbia, MO--1st Prize

Shaun Gladney, Oakland Junior High, Columbia, MO--2nd Prize

Mingu Kim, Smithton Middle School, Columbia, MO--3rd Prize

9-12 Song with Words

Eric Geil, Homeschool, Grandview, MO--1st Prize

Chris Rucker, Westran High School, Huntsville, MO--2nd Prize

9-12 Instrumental

Elizabeth Salley, Waynesville High School, St. Robert, MO--1st Prize

Carly McClain, Waynesville High School, St. Robert, MO--2nd Prize (tie)

Grant Bradshaw, Homeschool, Columbia, MO—2nd Prize (tie)

Victoria Yu, Rockbridge High, Columbia, MO--3rd Prize (tie)

Sara Wahoff, Homeschool, Jennings, MO—3rd Prize (tie)

Sinquefield Family Foundation Prize in Composition
2008 Winners at the University of Missouri-Columbia

Mark Woodward, Liberty, MO. Master's Student, Composition, Winner

Alex Blanton, Jeffersonville, IN. Master’s Student, Composition, Finalist

Kyoungsuk Chang, Cheonan, South Korea, Master’s Student, Composition, Finalist

Dustin Frieda, Springfield, MO. Senior, Viola, Honorable Mention

Documentary Available Now!!!

The documentary is finished but will have to wait to be seen...coming soon!

MU COMP Forum

We have created a forum for students and teachers (and anyone else) to discuss MU's Young Composers Program. Just click on the link to the left (forumgogo) or go directly to http://mucomp9.forumgogo.com

VIDEO COMING...

The Young Composers Competition will soon release the documentary from the 2008 competition. The video gets thoughts from students, teachers, and Jeanne Sinquefield, as well as displaying the amazing music that was produced.
Please stay tuned to watch last year's competition and the COMP summer camp!!!