Video: Harmonium sings ‘Fire Unfelt’ by Zachary Catron
By Kevin Coughlin
How do you top the end of the world?
That’s the creative challenge facing 16-year-old Zachary Catron.
The Mendham High School junior, winner of the 18th Annual Harmonium New Jersey High School Composition Contest, was beaming last weekend as the Harmonium Choral Society sang his winning entry, Fire Unfelt.
Set to a poem by Christina Rossetti, it’s a subdued piece about the planet going out not with a bang, but a whimper. It was part of a Harmonium program called Apocalpyse Now, which included choral treatments of Mayan doomsday predictions, Vesuvius obliterating Pompeii, the onset of both World Wars, and Radioactive by Imagine Dragons.
“It wasn’t too extravagant,” Catron said of his composition for voice and piano. “It’s a simple, peaceful, personal poem. Instead of the world coming to a fiery end, it’s more of a restful end.”
Earth dying in its sleep, in other words.
Catron caught the composing bug three or four years ago, when he saw the Mozart biopic, Amadeus.
“I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do!'”
“He’s grown by leaps and bounds in the last year,” said Catron’s musical mentor, David Sampson, a composer, instructor and past performer with Solid Brass.
Sampson said the contest proved that his student’s ideas could be translated into something organic and tangible. “You can do it on a computer. But until you hear it with live performers, it doesn’t exist,” said the Randolph resident.
Catron won $1,000 for his efforts.
Second place went to Reshma Kopparapu, a freshman at Newark Academy. Mount Olive High School freshman Carl Hausman, a frequent contributor to the MG Kids section of MorristownGreen.com, took third place honors with Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a four-movement composition.
Contestants chose from five texts supplied by Anne Matlack, Harmonium artistic director.
Matlack said she liked the form, harmonic language and use of piano (played by Helen Raymaker) in Catron’s winning entry. She also appreciated his suggestions during rehearsals; the teenager had firm ideas about the mood he wished to convey.
“He told us to make the tempo faster. He told the altos: ‘Cold, cold,'” Matlack recounted after Sunday’s performance at Grace Episcopal Church in Madison.
Catron sings in his school choir and plays piano, organ and violin–he was the fiddler in a community production of Fiddler on the Roof. His father also has instilled an affinity for Queen and Aerosmith, so don’t be surprised if future choral works crank the extravagance knob.
“Electronic music is so popular. You can’t run away from it,” said Catron.
And how did it feel to snuff out Mother Earth before our very ears?
“It’s always been on my bucket list,” the student said.
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