Two ACO Students Honored in 2020 American Composers Forum NextNotes High School Music Creator Awards

Two of ACO’s Compose Yourself students have been recognized in the sixth annual NextNotes® High School Music Creator Awards, a program of American Composers Forum (ACF). NextNotes is a national program designed to nurture the next generation of creative voices in music inclusive of all styles. The talented young artists convene as a cohort and receive mentorship, scholarship funds, and recognition through a national awards ceremony. Charlotte Weinstein won with her work Disequilibrium for string quartet, create in the 2019 summer Compose Yourself intensive and ACO student Abby Harris was awarded an honorable mention.

To read about the other five awardees, please click here.

CHARLOTTE WEINSTEIN (BROOKLYN, NY): DISEQUILIBRIUM FOR STRING QUARTET

Charlotte lives in Brooklyn and goes to school in Queens, New York, where she is a freshman at Bard High School Early College Queens. She plays cello with her school orchestra and with the Kaufman Music Center’s Face the Music Philharmonic, a youth orchestra that exclusively plays work of living composers. A lot of her influences and ideas for composing come from contemporary composers whose work she played there. She has also played piano, her first instrument, and even played trombone for a year with Visionary Youth Orchestra led by William Parker, Melanie Dyer, and Kyoko Kitamura, among others. She learned from William Parker that, during improvisation, no note is random, and so she thinks that sometimes even the concepts that don’t emerge in composing deliberately are worth expression. Her first composing classes were with Face the Music and the American Composers Orchestra. She thinks that the world she is currently living in should be reflected in the music we hear now.