The Sound of What’s Next
By Mia Arevalo
“New Music for Orchestra” unveils orchestral premieres of student compositions.
Each year, USC Thornton dedicates a symphonic concert to premiere new works by student composers from the Composition program. For those selected, “New Music for Orchestra” represents a transformative opportunity: The chance to hear their scores brought to life by a full orchestra in front of a live audience.
Led by Donald Crockett, chair of the Composition program, the concert serves as a crucial bridge between the classroom and a professional career. For doctoral student Linda Dallimore Linda Dallimore, the opportunity is about far more than just hearing her notes played aloud.
“It feels like such a privilege and an honor,” Dallimore said. “I’m so grateful for the opportunity to hear what I’ve invented in my head and have it realized by the orchestra.”
Dallimore’s piece, Honegger’s Wife, emerged from a personal journey of discovery. While researching other composers, she kept encountering references to “Honegger’s wife,” a woman she later learned was named Andrée Vaurabourg, a talented composer and musician in her own right who was overshadowed by her famous husband, Arthur Honegger.
“I went down this kind of rabbit hole of exploring,” Dallimore recalled. “She’s a composer. What did her music sound like? Did she compose things that were performed in concert? If so, can I listen to them? If not, why not?”
Despite reaching out to institutions across France, Dallimore could only locate a single fragment of Vaurabourg’s music: a counterpoint exercise. She embedded that fragment into her own composition. “My piece is meant as a kind of slow-burning feminist rage statement about the glacial rate of social change we’ve seen over the last few hundred years,” she said. “Hopefully now the audience might at least know Andrée Vaurabourg by name instead of just as Honegger’s wife or Boulez’s counterpoint teacher.”
For fellow master’s student Ben Beckman, the concert represents both a creative culmination and a professional launching pad. His piece, Ripple Infinity, is a 14-minute work built from a single musical idea heard at the very beginning, which then unfolds into what he describes as a series of “character studies” across the orchestra.
“You can read 10 orchestration textbooks, but until you hear your own music being played by an orchestra, by instrumentalists, you have no idea what it really sounds like,” Beckman said. “We are living in the beginning of the AI age, and the orchestra is the most anti-AI art making you can possibly make because it’s all human. That idea of breath and bodies being put behind the notes that you put on the page is what composing is about.”
Beckman also emphasized the unique nature of the opportunity USC provides. Unlike many institutions that offer only private readings, Thornton gives its composers a full public performance with professional audio and video recording.
“In order to make that jump to professional, you have to have a track record,” he explained. “The fact that USC performs these student works lets us not only come away with a score, but also a fantastic recording and video that really lets you make headway outside of the academic sphere.”
The impact of past concerts speaks for itself. Beckman pointed to composer Nina Shekhar’s Lumina, which premiered at this very concert a few years ago and was later picked up by the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
“That story is a real highlight of recent years,” he said. “Not a lot of schools offer this kind of program. It’s a huge asset for us students who are interested in this.”
For Dallimore, the experience has already informed her teaching. As a faculty member with the LA Phil’s Young Composer program, she finds herself drawing directly on what she’s just been through.
“It really helps me to have just written an orchestra piece, in my teaching,” she said. “I’m fresh with the process and I can easily recall what the pitfalls might be or what would be helpful advice.”
Both composers are keenly aware of the history they’re stepping into. The concert has launched numerous careers, and they hope their own works will follow a similar path.
“Ideally, any composer would love a second performance of a big orchestra piece,” Beckman said. “For us young composers, these are our major works. They take a huge amount of time and energy to write. This could open the door for me to possibly have a second performance outside of the known academic world of USC.”
For Linda Dallimore, the journey to this concert meant resurrecting a forgotten composer’s voice from a single fragment of counterpoint and intertwining it with her own. For Ben Beckman, it meant trusting that an idea introduced in the first few minutes could sustain fourteen, unfolding across the orchestra in ways even he couldn’t fully predict until the musicians arrived. These are the risks and rewards inherent in a concert like “New Music for Orchestra,” a capstone event that asks all participating composers to listen, to revise, to collaborate, and ultimately trust that what they have to say matters.
For all those who attended, this concert offered something irreplaceable: proof that a human voice, fully realized, will always have the power to move an audience. For Linda, Ben, and their fellow composers, that proof will carry long after the final note fades.
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Featured photo credit: Sherman Tsang
