CompFest Brings Harvard’s Musical Voices Together

The third annual Harvard Student Composer Festival, also known as CompFest, ran from April 10-15. Presented by the Office for the Arts and curated by artistic director Veronica F. Leahy ’23, CompFest highlighted student composers from diverse genres of music and created supportive spaces for artists to showcase their work for their peers and mentors.

The festival’s Student Spotlight Series took place from April 10-12. Each Spotlight event featured a panel of three student composers and a renowned professional musician to moderate conversations. Student artists gave ten-minute performances of original compositions. Afterwards, they discussed their work and composition process with the featured professional. Once all three composers presented their work, the floor opened for an audience Q&A.

Vijay Iyer — a pioneering jazz pianist and Professor of the Arts in the Harvard Music Department — moderated the first event on April 10. Grammy-winning jazz bassist and Berklee Professor Linda May Han Oh was the distinguished guest for the second panel on April 11.

Leahy, who founded the festival in 2020 and curated the composers as this year’s artistic director, described her primary intention for the festival to be a chance to uplift.

“CompFest is about people who play different types of music sort of encountering each other and inspiring each other,” she said.

In line with this spirit of embracing and celebrating all forms of music, the Spotlight panelists represented a wide variety of genres, from contemporary songwriting to jazz music and classical voice.

Mercedes F. Ferreira-Dias ’24, a singer-songwriter who identifies her music as “some form of indie-folk-pop,” participated in the first Spotlight event with Iyer. She described her experience as one of the best musically artistic spaces she has engaged in at Harvard.

Ferreira-Dias especially appreciated how her moderator Iyer noticed her unconventional approach to narrative structure.

“I feel like a lot of my songs are somewhat formless, or like difficult,” she said. “Not like a traditional pop form. And I feel like I take liberties with repetitive phrases that allow me as a singer, mostly, to be expressive in the way that I want to in that exact moment. He picked up on that and asked me about it.”

“You know when you are doing something intentionally — and usually it’s something that people don’t really notice — and when they do it feels so validating and encouraging?” Ferreira-Dias expressed.

The CompFest keynote event took the form of another Spotlight Series workshop that featured distinguished guest Michael R. Jackson, a leading voice in musical theater whose work “A Strange Loop” won two Tony awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. On April 12, he gave feedback on performances from three student-written musicals that premiered on campus over the past year: “Atalanta,” “Queen of Magic,” and “Out: An Asian American Musical.” Leahy felt that focusing the keynote presentation on musical theater was the right choice given Jackson’s expertise and the rich array of student-written musicals on campus this semester.

Mira-Rose J. Kingsbury Lee ’24, who wrote “Atalanta” over the course of 10 years and co-directed its campus production, found it useful to look at songs written for the stage “from just a purely musical perspective.”

“They don’t often get considered as sort of musical works. They’re more often lauded or criticized in terms of their lyrics — or you know — content, or how they fit in the context of the show.”

Kingsbury Lee also shared that although “there is naturally some overlap between people who compose for theater and the people who compose for other media or genres. CompFest is very useful in that it brings those people together a lot more.”

CompFest culminated with a Cabaret performance that stayed true to the festival’s ethos of unifying diverse musical voices. The Cabaret, held on April 15 in the Leverett Library Theater, featured 13 student acts, ranging from an operatic interpretation of a dialogue from “Frankenstein” to COVID-inspired love songs to an excerpt from the upcoming First-Year Musical. Laughter, applause, and spontaneous cheers filled the cozy theater and created a warm, supportive atmosphere.

Emulating the casual energy of a coffeehouse performance was one of Leahy’s goals to make the Cabaret a welcoming space for diverse composers of all styles and experiences to present their work.

Abigail Ory ’23 — a performer in previous CompFests who emceed the event and helped produce this year’s festival — added, “Something that's very special about Cabaret is, while the Spotlight Series artists are selected and curated, Cabaret has no audition process; just first-come first-serve, you fill out a form and you’re in.”

Ory recalled how CompFest’s accessibility was extremely impactful for her when she initially participated in CompFest as a performer: “I hadn’t even really thought of myself as a composer before [Leahy] asked me to do this. I used to shirk the label when it would come up.”

While Leahy and Ory will graduate this spring and hand over the festival to a new cohort of musicians, they are confident that CompFest’s spirit will carry on.

“Every year is going to take on a different flavor, and I think that’s what is exciting about it. But with that said what I hope remains the same is the commitment to a diversity of music,” said Leahy. “I strongly believe that — as the curators and people running the festival — as long as we follow the music, there will be an incredible diversity.”