The Musician's Guide to Illinois
The Full Story
My project, The Musician’s Guide to Illinois is a large-scale orchestral composition that expands upon my earlier project, The Pianist’s Guide to Illinois, which aimed to create a short piano piece for every city, town, and village in the state. That initial concept emerged from a lofty yet sincere goal: to give every place, no matter how small, a sense of musical identity. I imagined music teachers in towns like Mason City or Farmer City opening a book and finding a composition specifically about where they lived. It was an effort to make music feel personal, local, and accessible—to turn geography into sound.
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The Pianist’s Guide to Illinois began as a small scale ethnographic and sonic study of the rural Illinois landscapes with the intention of pedagogical function. It was initially a commission by the Illinois Chapter of the Music Teacher’s National Association. While I feel I had given a sonic voice to the underserved population of the rural audience via local performance, The Musician’s Guide to Illinois, is meant to present those voices to a wider, national audience.
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This work shifts from its solo piano origin to the broader, more communal palette of the orchestra, allowing for richer textures and a more immersive emotional range. In addition to personal storytelling, this phase of the project incorporates ethnographic research into Illinois folk music and regional traditions. Drawing on field recordings, local archives, oral histories, and informal interviews, I am exploring how these rural cultures can be woven into original orchestral writing.
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The goal is not to recreate or appropriate folk traditions, but to respectfully engage with them - to let their shapes, rhythms, and aesthetics inform the composition. In doing so, The Musician’s Guide to Illinois becomes both a musical document and a creative reimagining: a work that connects past and present, personal and collective, rural and urban, local and orchestral.
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Ultimately, this project seeks to honor the cultural and musical diversity of Illinois—not by summarizing it, but by listening to it. Through this work, I aim to create a living archive: a concert-length piece that reflects how people understand and remember the places they come from, and how music can serve as a vessel for belonging.
Project Components
Project Title: The Musician's Guide to Illinois​
Medium: Electro-Acoustic Music Score​
Instrumentation: Symphonic Orchestra and Fixed Media​
Duration: 25-35 minutes
Research Area: Music Composition and Ethnomusicology