Senior Spotlight: Benjamin M. Woo

For Benjamin M. Woo ’13, who began playing the piano when he was seven years old, his interest in composing has always followed his study of performance. “I always had an eye for composing because the composers were the ones I really admired when I was playing their music,” Woo says. “I wanted to do that for a long time and tried from a really long time, but was never happy with the outcome.”

Woo’s desire to compose music was further heightened after he took an introductory music composition course his freshman year. “Since then, I’ve kept at it and am just starting to get to a point where I feel like I can write something and present it as a composition,” Woo says. “I normally start by sitting at the piano and improvising for a while. Whenever I come across some musical idea that feels likes it’s going somewhere, like it has some sort of life to it, then I’ll write that down. Every once in a while, something I write down actually develops into something.”

Last semester, he finished a three-minute piece entitled “As in Stone.” Woo describes it as written for four unspecified musical lines. “It’s very slow and simple and kind of mirrored my mood at the time, I guess.”

A pianist, cellist, and music director of the Din & Tonics a cappella group, with whom he will perform during Arts First, Woo identifies as a composer—but even to him, that title sounds a bit strange. “Composer evokes classical European guys, and that’s not exactly the sense in which I think of it,” Woo says. For him, the goal is to write music that is accessible. “A lot of the music I love is really old and sometimes feels distant from culture today. At the same time, I also like a lot of modern music—indie rock, alternative rock, and alternative forms of experimental music. So those two worlds are constantly playing into the music I compose.”

—Staff writer Adabelle U. Ekechukwu can be reached at aekechukwu14@college.harvard.edu.