Music department supports students in performance and competition

A guitar-clarinet musical duet, Jâca, visited campus to perform a student-submitted composition and teach masterclasses.

Truman’s clarinet professor Jesse Krebs said he organizes at least one masterclass every semester. He invited Wesley Ferreira, clarinet professor at Colorado State University and member of Jâca, to teach Oct. 7.

Krebs said his hope for the masterclasses is that students either hear new feedback he hadn’t thought of or hear what he has suggested from someone else so it clicks.

“Mostly, I just want it to be a rewarding experience, to stand up and play nervous, and then to get some feedback from another teacher,” Krebs said.

Krebs teaches masterclasses at other universities and said he compares his own notes with professors who visit Truman. Krebs said he thinks musicians can learn a lot from interacting with each other.

Ferreira said different perspectives are helpful for students learning music.

“The world is so much bigger than what [students] experience everyday, so whenever you have someone from the outside sharing their thoughts, answering questions, giving their perspectives, it opens up their world,” Ferreira said.

During the masterclass, students were invited to play pieces they had been practicing in front of Ferreira for critiques and advice. Ferreira asked the audience questions and invited them to advise their peers.

Ferreira provided students with advice on how to perform rather than play the clarinet. One masters student who attended, Evan O’Day, said a few of Ferreira’s critiques were technical but his focus on theatricality and expression of the clarinetists were more fun.

Ferreira said Jâca visited campus because of O’Day winning their 2024-2025 Emerging Composers Competition.

“I think his masterclass was a great example of bringing back some more soul and motion into the art,” O’Day said.

O’Day said it can be hard for artists to keep track of why they started music when chasing auditions, seeking good grades or following a subjective form of perfection.

O’Day did not play at this masterclass but said he has participated in multiple at the University and through working at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp.

Junior music education major Beckett Whitworth played songs from Gary Schocker’s “Weird Little Pieces” on the bass clarinet. Whitworth said Ferreira suggested he work on clueing the audience into the title or mood of the pieces without having to say them out loud.

“I think it’s tremendously helpful as a musician, and someone also going into education, having different viewpoints of what you’re learning and how you’re performing it,” Whitworth said.

After Whitworth played each piece, Ferreira asked the audience to describe the feeling or guess the title of the work. Whitworth plays bass and soprano clarinet. Whitworth said he has performed in masterclasses before and Krebs told him at the beginning of the semester that he would do this one.

Jâca was originally invited to perform last spring to play O’Day’s score in his senior showcase.

O’Day said he applied for the competition after receiving an email about the opportunity from his composition professor Victor Márquez-Barrios. He said he received a $500 prize along with having the opportunity for his work to be published, recorded and premiered by Jâca.

“You get rejected by 90% of [competitions], but then you win a couple like this,” O’Day said.

He said his interest in music and composition started when he was little. O’Day said his parents both played clarinet and put him in piano lessons at a young age, which eventually turned into him messing around with GarageBand and making beats.

O’Day studied music composition as an undergraduate and was on the MAE track. O’Day said he started as a percussionist, switched to cello and then added composition in his junior year.

He asked Jâca to perform the piece for his senior recital last spring, and they agreed but had to cancel and reschedule.

Originally, Jâca was going to perform one piece during O’Day’s recital, but O’Day said the plan changed to them playing the score in the midst of their setlist.

“I actually kind of prefer it that way [because] I liked to hear what my piece sounds like in the context of standard clarinet guitar repertoire,” O’Day said.

He said Jâca’s performance was visually very interesting and he could see the expression and how important that is to Ferreira in the way he played.