This year, the National Tri-M Music Honor Society has gained new leadership, which has brought new opportunities. For the first time, in December, the officers of Tri-M held a winter-themed composition contest. President Sonia Chu created the contest to showcase the members’ skills and talents and create a fun activity for the club.
“With this contest, we were dipping our toes in the water; we wanted to see how this event would go before we start off on making more fun events for Tri-M,” Chu said.
A few members of Tri-M submitted pieces and the club voted on the piece they liked the best. Sophomore Levinson Yang won the contest with his piece titled “First Fall of Snow”.
“This piece is about how I felt during the first fall of snow, and how happy I was… I wanted the music to feel like snow falling, so I started at a higher pitch, and improvised with the pentatonic scale with chords to lower pitches, as snow falling,” Yang shared.
Surprisingly, this accomplishment was his first formal composition.
“Since I was a kid I was able to use spurs of ideas and create a piece out of it however, it wasn’t anything formal such as for a contest or written down in sheet music.”
Tri-M’s contest and Yang’s composition have reached the rest of the student body.
“I was listening to the audio in study hall and the person next to me was impressed by it too. She kept on asking me to keep on playing the audio because she loved hearing it,” Chu said.
