Recording and Performance

Hybrid Recording Sessions

Undergraduates and First-Year Graduate students are given multiple hybrid recording sessions in which they write for one or more top industry soloists to record over the music they created using sample libraries and synthesizers. Students learn to produce their own sessions, work with players, and learn best practices for producing top quality professional demos with a combination of live and virtual instruments.

Orchestral Recording Sessions

Undergraduate and Graduate students record with multiple orchestral ensembles, including the NYU Symphony as the hands-on laboratory for the advanced orchestration class.

Second-year graduate students write and record remotely with both a string orchestra and full orchestra in Prague.  Prague has become a major center of orchestral recording for film scores, such that the musicians, engineers and studios are world class. NYU Screen Scoring produces the Prague sessions via a remote audio/video hookup in a state-of-the-art room, reflecting real world recording situations for young composers.

NYU Film Scoring Competition

Undergraduates and Graduate students are eligible to participate in our annual NYU Film Scoring Competition. Students submit a score for one of the several animated films created by the NYU Tisch animation class. The winning composers have their pieces performed and recorded by the NYU Symphony Orchestra (NYU Symphony) as part of the orchestra’s concert series.

IFA Performance of Film Scores

Undergraduates and Graduate students submit scores to be performed to picture by a live ensemble in the stunning Great Hall of the Institute of Fine Arts.

Bleep Bloop

Led by enterprising undergraduates, this dynamic concert places an emphasis on the intersection between music and technology. The concert is an opportunity for composition and tech majors to work together and explore the connections between their fields.

Pulsing & Shaking

Pulsing & Shaking is a music festival organized by NYU Steinhardt undergraduates that celebrates New Music created in New York. The festival—taking place over the course the month of February at New York University—creates a space for composers and performers to present music in context. Foundational works of the past few decades are programmed alongside music hot off the printing press, in an effort to present a cross-generational picture of the incredibly rich history of music-making in our city. Eschewing labels and genres, Pulsing & Shaking is about music that lives and breathes New York, capturing the many energies and landscapes contained within. It’s not music about New York, so much as music indebted to New York.

With its expansive programming, Pulsing & Shaking seeks to introduce audiences to the newest music of our time—presenting premiere performances by young composers—while simultaneously putting a spotlight on the music that got us to where we are today, and everything in between. It commissions new works, presents public dialogues, and fosters collaborations across media, all in the service of building community and helping audiences rediscover the richness of our city’s New Music.

UnSilent Film

This concert features new music by NYU composers written specifically for silent film clips of the past.  

Selected composers select clips from silent films and write music for small ensembles to accompany them.  While ragtime piano often comes to mind when thinking about silent film music, composers are given complete freedom in style and role of the music.  Additionally, the silent film need not be from the past, though choosing a historical clip is encouraged.  

Organized and presented by the undergraduate Composer’s Collective.

Composer’s Collective Final Concert

This semesterly concert showcases the diverse compositional voices within the NYU Steinhardt Composition program. There are no aesthetic guidelines for this concert, so the program is quite diverse- chamber music, musical theater, solo pieces, film scores, and songs are all encouraged.