This attitude is at the core of the Student CoLab, which works with students not only to build the skills required for composing a new work, but also to develop broader skills in listening, music critique, and collaborative teamwork. It also dovetails with the community values of El Puente (which include respect, determination, and empathy), whose Beacon Leadership Program is a partner with National Sawdust for the Student CoLab.

El Puente’s focus on the arts and sports, as tools for young people to create and influence social change, factors into the pieces that are being developed this year. One example is a work-in-progress by Paredes, which begins with a buoyant cello melody that sounds like something out of Janáček’s or Bartók’s folk songs. A poem written and read by the composer accompanies the musical lines, and begins with a sense of hope at the prospect of moving to New York.

Both the text and music take a darker, more discordant shift when she touches on the uncertain side of the experience. After a group listen, student composer Amelia Cervantes says that the line “The day that I might be illegal” stuck with her. “It’s not just your experience, but maybe the experience of someone else,” she says of how the line may resonate with the audience. Diaz-Stanton adds that the emotional resonance can go deeper for listeners: “It’s not just feeling illegal, but feeling excluded.”

If these themes sound like they’re part of National Sawdust’s Artist-in-Residence and Projects programs, that’s by design. Over the last three months, students have seen performances at Sawdust and met with some of its artists. The 2019 Student CoLab is also inspired by Forward Music Project, Gookin’s own ongoing collaboration with projection designer S. Katy Tucker. Driven by social justice and empowerment for women and girls, the project features 12 works by female and non-binary composers written for solo cello, voice, electronics, and video projection. The project dovetails perfectly with El Puente’s theme for the 2018-19 school year of educational justice and gender empowerment.

The 11 Student CoLab composers have a similar set of tools to work with for their pieces, which also include projections developed by five of their classmates in collaborating with Tucker, lead teaching artist Gil Feliciano, and assistant teaching artist Megan Gomez. The art students are also creating a film documenting the program, to be shown as an introduction to the concert.

While a focus on the technical skills in both composition and video production is undeniable, these elements of how are driven by the main core of why. What are students hoping to communicate? If they can answer this question, the teaching artists can help with everything else.

“I’m not looking for those fancy music words,” Negrón says to the group before they break off into one-on-ones with assistant teaching artists Kyla-Rose Smith and Stephanie Garcia, and with Negrón herself. “I want to know exactly what you want.”

This is what prompts Diaz-Stanton, in her session with Negrón, to set aside her growing vocabulary of musical terms for something more tangible, as they work out what will eventually be a song that she sings with Gookin on cello.

“It’s like ice cream,” she explains of the piece. “Chocolate ice cream from the machine is the worst. Chocolate ice cream from your freezer is better, because it’s so rich.”