The New Jersey Symphony has hosted four young composers at its Edward T. Cone Composition Institute since 2014 (with the exception of 2020 during the pandemic), offering them a rare opportunity to work through one of their compositions with a professional orchestra. Throughout the week, the composers get to hear their scores played by the orchestra and receive feedback from the orchestra musicians, conductor, Institute Director and conductor Steve Mackey, and each other. Using that feedback and their own observations, they rework their piece, and then the symphony performs all of them in concert at the end of the week. There are also a number of career development sessions, covering topics such as public speaking, publishing and promoting their works.
This year's participants were Tom Morrison, Kory Reeder, Sam Wu and Yangfan Xu, and A Tempo host Rachel Katz visited them to hear about the scores they brought to work on and the experience of fine-tuning the music for performance.
