Student Composes String Quintet for Summer Fellowship from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.

Music major Samuel Kyzivat ’18 composed his first piano quintet over the summer break, thanks to a Patterson/Baird Family Research Fellowship. Kyzivat said he drew on influences from jazz, film music and some of the great composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, such as Antonin Dvorak and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

He said he wants to encourage more non-music students to come to classical concerts, and his goal was to create a piece of music that is easy to listen to and accessible. The work was recorded in early August by visiting musicians from the Bowdoin International Music Festival. But Kyzivat said the piece was written specifically for classically trained Bowdoin students to perform, and he’s hoping to organize a public premiere of the composition on campus sometime in the coming year.