Last semester, senior Kate Schau sat down with one goal in mind: to create an original song for the blue band to perform in their concert on Wednesday, May 6. Now, Schau has finally been able to achieve this goal.

Although the concert hasn’t happened yet, Kate has finally finished her composition and the blue band is now practicing it.

“It’s just so cool think about that I sat down a semester ago with nothing and now I have this entire seven-page piece with 20 or so parts to it,” Schau said. “It’s really exciting to think about.”

Despite the fact that Schau has created an original piece, she struggled to establish a part for percussion without receiving help from assistant band director Elliot Arpin.

“I am a lowly wind player, so I do not know what happens back behind me ever with the percussion,” Schau said. “Writing a percussion part kind of felt like fumbling around and tapping buttons and hoping it sounded fine. I asked Arpin a lot, ‘Does this sound ridiculous?’ or ‘Are we okay?’”

Schau said band director Debra Steiner played a big part in helping her start her composition.

“She kind of directed me to start with … and then I took it in a direction that I wanted to and played around with it,” Schau said. “After I knew what I was doing direction-wise, she let me loose on it.”

An important part of Schau’s composition was making it look good so students would want to play her piece.

“Everyone I’ve talked to has been like, ‘Yeah it’s fun.” I know someone said it was the best formatted song that he’d seen,” Schau said. “ I wanted to make sure everyone liked looking at it so they would want to play it.”

Schau said finally hearing her composition come to life was her favorite part about the process.

“Actually having the band play it and hearing it for the first time is really exciting,” Schau said. “It was pretty exciting hearing all of the parts come together.”