Current Lakeland senior, Ashley Esser, who graduates this spring with a music major accompanied by two emphases, will hold a music recital in the Bradley Theater at 7 p.m. on May 2, to highlight her compositions and arrangements. The emphases she will graduate with include business & contemporary music and composition & song writing.
Esser will go down in history as the first Lakeland student to graduate with the composition & song writing emphasis, which was first introduced in 2018. This emphasis is designed to be flexible depending on the student’s background and style. In Esser’s case, her compositions have been primarily made for band or orchestra instrumentation, and Dr. Evan Chancellor, the director of music at Lakeland University, has commented that her style tends to be neo-classical with inspiration from current pop music and modern film scores.
Esser gives thanks to her parents for exposing her to music throughout her life and believes that it heavily influenced her to come to Lakeland as a music major. She stated that her mother forced her to choose the French horn in fifth grade, which she “did not appreciate because no one else in her class had picked it.” But as she grew as a musician, and after she received a quality French horn in high school, she came to love her instrument and playing music. Esser also taught herself how to play piano over the years and has recently begun teaching herself how to play guitar and violin.
Alongside learning new instruments, Esser has recently become inspired by the artist Cody Fry, who is known for taking pop songs and composing epic orchestral versions of them. Using this inspiration, Esser created three of her own arrangements including “A Sky Full of Stars,” “Sail” and “Epic Horn Snippets.” The first song was originally by Coldplay, but Esser arranged it for a string quartet. “Sail” was originally by the artist AWOLNATION, and Esser arranged it for an entire band. The “Epic Horn Snippets” are a collection of different segments from some of Esser’s favorite films such as “Avatar,” “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Avengers,” “Chariots of Fire,” “Jurassic Park,” “Robin Hood” and “Pirates of the Carribean.” These segments were then combined and arranged into a piece for a French horn quartet.
She has also created multiple compositions that have been performed at Lakeland by the bands. One of them, titled “Muskie Madness,” was played by the college’s pep band as the homecoming half-time performance in 2023. “Tropical Tantrum,” another composition by Esser, was played by the symphonic band in a concert at the beginning of this school year.
For the recital, Esser is premiering a new song that she wrote for her senior honor’s project. This piece, “A Journey Towards Hope,” was created by Esser in partnership with the Maywood Environmental Park in Sheboygan to shine light on the various environmental issues the world faces today. In collaboration with park director Kendra Kelling, Esser was able to compose a piece that embodied the beauty of nature by utilizing natural sounds such as waving papers to create the sound of wind, train sounds to display the effects of industrialization, stormy weather to symbolize natural disasters and the feeling of dawn breaking over a new horizon which is highlighted by epic, soaring melodies. Esser explains that the piece concludes with “a simple ‘amen’ cord progression that ends the piece with a feeling of hopefulness for the future.”
