by Mike Telin
At a time when performing musical scores during the showings of blockbuster films has become popular programming for symphony orchestras, it’s interesting to turn back the clock to an era when audiences never heard the actors’ voices and the music was always performed live by whatever size ensemble was available.
This past semester a group of Oberlin students in the Music and Melodrama on Stage and Screen class, taught by Emily Laurance, immersed themselves in the creation of film scores from a historical perspective.
On Friday, May 10 the members of the class presented their final projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station. “The Many Moods of Melodrama: Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir” was a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining evening that featured five short silent films exploring the melodramatic mode, with original scores performed by the students.
“A lot of people have preconceived ideas about what free improv is, and that it means everything is totally random,” violinist Leah Asher said in a recent interview, speaking from her home in New York City. “But there is a total spectrum of the amount of determinacy in music, and I like to think about where I am on that spectrum.” Also a violist, composer, and visual artist, Asher recently recorded a series of improvisations for the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project’s 2021 Re:Sound Festival.
A group of students at Oberlin College and Conservatory are spreading gratitude and raising funds for 
The audience may have been more restrained than the appreciatively foot-stomping listeners who typically pack into Finney Chapel back home — but not by much. The crowd in New York’s Carnegie Hall gave two ensembles from Oberlin College and Conservatory a warm reception on January 19, with loud cheers and even some shoutouts to the players onstage. All well-deserved.