BYCA and Kirk Nurock: A History

Kirk Nurock: About the Composer
KirkNurockKirk Nurock is widely acclaimed as a composer, a jazz pianist, a conductor and an educator. Nurock was approached by Founder and Artistic Director Dianne Berkun in 2000 to write his first piece of music for youth chorus. Berkun was seeking jazz music written for kids, which at the time was hard to find. Recalls Nurock, "I was so impressed by Dianne's openness, her vision for BYCA and her interest in educating her students in a range of styles and sounds. We started talking and just 'clicked' immediately."

Though the idea of writing specifically for youth chorus was new to Nurock, he was very experienced in writing for voices, having spent years experimenting with unusual and offbeat vocal sounds and developing what he refers to as his "extended technique" (he once did a project involving human voices integrating with live animal sounds at the zoo, for example). To get started with BYCA choristers he first immersed himself in listening to the chorus sing. "The students were so advanced that the challenge was not as much in working with voices or vocal range as it was in teaching the style of jazz, which is so improvisatory and personal, to a chorus that was classically trained. We literally did physical and vocal exercises for several months to teach them to be loose and bouncy...less precise," says Nurock, "and I had to encourage them to stop making beautiful sounds!" While a few students came to the jazz genre with some background, perhaps from music heard at home, most did not. In all cases, Nurock remembers them all as "wide open vessels"--open to learning.

Nurock views BYCA as a "demonstration of human potential...of what young people are capable of and of what we must all aspire to be." He continues to write for the chorus and over the years has contributed five new works to their repertoire. As for his compositional process, he describes sometimes being inspired by the sounds of specific choristers and other times just by the chorus as a whole. "They may not realize this, but I'm almost always working on something for BYCA--whether or not we're engaged in a specific project. I look forward to the next challenge."

Comissioned Compositions: Love Is Your Name, Visible Invisible, Grandma Danced the Minuet, Na Ni-Na, Will There Really Be A Morning

www.kirknurock.com