Elementary and middle school students got to hear a world premiere by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on March 20, and the composer wasn\u2019t much older than them.<\/p>\n
The PSO had put out a call for compositions from people living in Pennsylvania. Out of more than 100 works submitted, 17-year-old Ethan Hsu\u2019s piece was selected. Ethan is from Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
He came to Pittsburgh to watch along with thousands of students from around our region.<\/p>\n
\u201cI first started composing when I was around 10 or 11 years old. So really, I was actually about your age when I started,\u201d Hsu told the audience.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a lot of musical inspirations for me, especially the work of J.S. Bach and Beethoven,\u201d he explained. \u201cI play piano and cello, so they are big musical voices in my life. I also watch a lot of YouTube, so I saw a lot of music videos that got me into composing.\u201d<\/p>\n
PSO conductor Jacob Joyce praised Hsu\u2019s piece and was glad the young composer could enjoy it in Pittsburgh.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a particularly technically tricky composition, which is good for Ethan to hear here. The PSO can play it at a level a lot of other orchestras couldn\u2019t quite do,\u201d Joyce said.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s an unbelievably strong piece, especially for someone at a high school level. It was a pleasure to conduct the piece as well. It\u2019s a very exciting piece.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hsu says he wants to teach music someday. He currently plays with his high school orchestra, is a co-director of the Pitt Orchestra and is also in a pre-college program with the Juilliard School.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elementary and middle school students got to hear a world premiere by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on March…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146278,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13507,73,75,74,9581],"class_list":{"0":"post-146277","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-kdka-tv","9":"tag-pittsburgh","10":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","11":"tag-pittsburgh-news","12":"tag-pittsburgh-symphony-orchestra"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146277\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}