CIM Composition Department

while working with a world-class faculty devoted to training the complete musician of the 21st century. In the rich and diverse musical climate of our time, I welcome and encourage a variety of compositional styles among my students. My primary goal is to help you discover and cultivate your own personal and unique compositional language. I work with each student on how to write dynamic, sophisticated, and moving music, while also learning to develop musical material, shape the overall design and architecture of a piece, and nurture and expand your musical knowledge, taste, sophistication, and judgment. CIM strives to provide our composers with as many opportunities as possible. Among them is our Partnership Program, which pairs student composers with student performers, who then come to that student's composition lesson to work together on the realization of his or her ideas. This “hands-on” experience of working directly with performers as part of the creative process is invaluable to a young composer's development and is one of the things which makes CIM such a unique place to study. Another is our biannual collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Art, pairing student composers with student filmmakers to create short films to be shown in the Shafran Planetarium at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. This collaboration offers our students valuable experience in the art of collaboration, film scoring, and sound design. CIM students consistently are among the nation's most celebrated young composers. Their awards include honors from the Fulbright Foundation, the ASCAP-Morton Gould Young Composer Awards, the BMI Student Composers Competition, the Charles Ives Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kronos String Quartet Under 30 commission; the National Association of Composers USA Competition, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Composition Prize, the Leo Kaplan Prize, the National Federation of Music Clubs competition, and the Ohio Federation of Music Clubs Composition Competition

Our students regularly receive commissions from SCI, ASCAP, the BMI Foundation, the New York Youth Symphony, as well as new music ensembles and soloists throughout the nation. Additionally, CIM students have received residences at the Copland House, Camargo (Cassis, France), the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, the Aspen Summer Music Festival, the Free University Berlin Institute, Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, Fresh, Inc. Festival, New Music on the Point, California Summer Music, and Brevard Summer Music, among others. I invite you to explore our community – one committed to the complete training of the creative artist of the 21st century.

- Keith Fitch
Head, Composition Dept.