Blackbird Elementals Gives Teens a Chance to Collaborate with Living Composers

By Cliff Hall | From the March/April 2026 issue of Strings

On a warm spring afternoon late last April, a group of teenage musicians gathered in Santa Monica to premiere newly commissioned works for which they had no recordings to lean on and no performance history to imitate. For violinist Sadie Sheldon, that unfamiliarity wasn’t a conceptual thrill so much as a practical challenge: Without something to listen to, every decision—tone, timing, character—had to be built from scratch.

“Without even knowing it, you mirror your playing with the way you’ve heard it being played,” Sheldon says of familiar repertoire. New pieces required a new way of thinking. “This was really the first time I had to think about the tone of the piece itself and how I could express exactly what the composer wanted, because we actually had contact with him.”

That experience—learning how to play music she had never heard before—was central to Blackbird Elementals, a collaboration between after-school ensemble program Elemental Music and Grammy Award–winning sextet Eighth Blackbird that unfolded as a part of Elemental Music’s Chamber Music Institute. Students formed ensembles in the fall, received their commissioned works by mid-November, and worked on them through the academic year, meeting with composers and preparing the pieces for their premiere performances in late April. Over the course of the year, students rehearsed new works by six composers—Juhi Bansal, Sakari Dixon, April Dawn Guthrie, Carolina Heredia, Thomas Kotcheff, and Wenbin Lyu—engaging directly with the people who wrote the music they were learning.

For the trio that worked with Wenbin Lyu, the commissioned piece was Duck & Roll, written specifically for the ensemble. When Sheldon first encountered it, the work existed only on the page and in conversation with its composer. Since then, the piece has gone on to receive additional performances, including by Eighth Blackbird, but for the students involved, its early rehearsals required inventing an interpretive language from the ground up.

The premieres took place at St. Augustine-by-the-Sea church in Santa Monica, a light-filled Episcopal sanctuary rebuilt in 1967 after a fire. The venue came into play after the original host, the Parish of St. Matthew’s in Pacific Palisades, was forced to suspend its music series due to the Palisades Fire; the two churches worked together to relocate the concert and make the performances possible.

For violinist Salomón Singer, another student performer, the biggest challenge was stylistic. “I typically play Classical and Romantic repertoire, so contemporary music was relatively new territory for me,” he says. “Learning and performing these pieces required a different mindset. It was less about drawing on stylistic traditions I was already familiar with and more about understanding each composer’s specific intentions.”

Singer participated in three premieres over the course of the year, each with distinct demands. A quintet by Thomas Kotcheff posed one kind of challenge. “It was less programmatic and much more abstract,” Singer says. “There were a lot of moving parts that fit together like a puzzle, which made it rambunctious and really exciting to play.” The piece required a bold sound and close attention to how intricate lines locked together rhythmically.

A large ensemble work was a different experience altogether: April Dawn Guthrie’s 7000rpm, written for open instrumentation. As Guthrie explains in her program notes, the title evokes a moment of intense focus and immersion—“where everything fades . . . and all that’s left is a body moving through space and time.” The piece brought together students from across Elemental Music’s ensembles—strings, winds, piano, guitar, and voice—and introduced extended techniques, including knocking on instruments, gestures far removed from the traditional repertoire Singer was used to playing.

According to Elemental Music, the commissions were not conceived as simplified teaching material. They were written to stand as fully realized contemporary chamber works and will be available for performance beyond their premieres. For the students involved, the project offered not just exposure to new music, but sustained proximity to it—the chance to rehearse, question, and shape music while its composers were still active participants in the process.

Elemental Music has a long history of commissioning new works for young musicians, including projects supported by CalASTA grants. What distinguished Blackbird Elementals was the scale of the undertaking and the degree of interaction it required. “There is something special about being able to feel true ownership over a piece of music,” says Emily Call, Elemental Music’s Chamber Music Institute director and director of marketing and communications. “With this project, students weren’t just premiering new works—they were working directly with the composers.”

That access proved essential. Both Bansal and Kotcheff attended rehearsals and offered feedback, but Singer emphasizes that the exchange felt collaborative rather than prescriptive. “They genuinely wanted our input and ideas,” he says. “It felt like a mutual effort rather than just executing their exact vision.”

The collaboration with Eighth Blackbird added another dimension. Founded in 1996 by six students at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Eighth Blackbird has built an international reputation through its advocacy for living composers and its educational initiatives, alongside a performance career that has earned four Grammy Awards for Best Small Ensemble/Chamber Music Performance, a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, and Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year.

Three members of the ensemble—Lisa Kaplan, Matthew Duvall, and Maiani da Silva—coached students throughout the year, focusing not only on technical mastery but on how contemporary music is physically and theatrically presented. Singer recalls being struck by the ensemble’s approach. “They brought an energy and physicality that made contemporary music feel alive,” he says. “Sometimes this kind of music can come across as overly academic, but watching Eighth Blackbird showed that it doesn’t have to be presented that way.”

For Sheldon, the experience reshaped how she listens and plays. “With the help of Eighth Blackbird, these new ideas didn’t seem so foreign,” she says. “I became more comfortable playing, which brought my part to life.”

Blackbird Elementals did not simply introduce students to contemporary music. It placed them inside its making—across an academic year, in direct conversation with composers and performers—asking them to take responsibility for sound before tradition could step in. Before there was a recording, there were questions. Learning how to ask them, and how to listen for the answers, may be the most lasting lesson of all.