Congratulations to Ian Underhill Cady, City of Lakes Waldorf School Alumnus, who recieved a NextNotes High School Composition Awards from The American Composer’s Forum on April 23, 2015.
NextNotes is a new, national program designed to nurture the next generation of creative voices in music composition regardless of musical style. Awards encourage and recognize the creative and talented composers with mentorship, scholarship funds and a performance of their work by professional musicians. Only six students nationwide received the award.
About Ian Underhill-Cady, NextNotes High School Composition Awards Winner
Ian Underhill-Cady began composing while attending City of Lakes Waldorf School and graduated in the class of 2011. In his 8th grade year he created a music video featuring an original composition for his 8th grade project and also composed a song that his class sang at graduation. Ian is now 18 years old and a senior at the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Golden Valley, MN.
Underhill-Cady, a.k.a. Underhill, is a Minneapolis-based composer, electronic musician, and co-founder of the Desoplex Art Collective. He creates his music with no heed given to genre or convention and instead works to direct focus towards the music itself, as a contained and isolated experience. Underhill is a graduate of the Perpich Center for Arts Education (June 2015), where he has grown within a vibrant and forward-thinking community of artists. It was at the Perpich Center that he met the artists that would eventually band together to form the Desoplex Collective. The collective currently consists of fourteen members, all in high school, that range in focuses including composition, media arts, visual arts, art direction and many more. Together they create material that blends and combines numerous mediums. Since its inception in the spring of 2014, Desoplex has released three official LPs by various artists. One of these LPs was Underhill’s debut album “Metanoia.” In this work, he uses lyricism and compositional symbolism to explore the substance of what it is to be human. His music stands as open territory between that which is him and that which is not, providing the listener a chance to understand the composer, if only for a moment. More than anything, his music is a form of communication and serves as his most intimate form of personal connection.
The NextNotes winners will travel to St. Paul, Minnesota in June for mentorship with leading professional composers Joshua Clausen, Joe Horton, and Libby Larsen.
Don’t miss The NextNotes Showcase Concert at 8 pm on June 27th in the Mairs Concert Hall at Macalester College! It is free and open to the public. Congratulations Ian- we can’t wait to see you perform!