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CLASSICAL
SPREAD DESIGN BY CAROLINE EDGAR
Freshman Ovya Diwakaran plays the piano in her living room. Diwakaran has been playing the piano since she was only 5 years old and composes her own music. “Music can always get better.” (Photo by Ginger Schulte)
ALL ABOUT THAT PIANO Freshman Ovya Diwakaran wins second at a state-wide composing music competition
MIKA KIPNIS news staff
T
he red recording button shines from freshman Ovya Diwakaran’s iPhone as she gently places her fingers on the white and black keys of the piano. After a deep breath, she begins to play the first notes of the piece she has spent the last year composing. Diwakaran is an aspiring pianist and composer. She spends her time juggling between performing under the lights of the stage and composing her own original music. “I really like performing because I love to show people what I can do,” Diwakaran said. Diwakaran entered the 2020 Missouri Creating Original Music Project, organized by the University of Missouri. She finished as the runner-up in the state-wide competition with her originally composed piece “Reve Eternal.” “Reve Eternal” was inspired by modern piano music such as Yiruma’s “River Flows In You.” “My favorite type of music to create is when you take a simple melody and you transform it into something really big and pretty,” Diwakaran said. “I worked out a small melody and added in arpeggios and bases and tied it all together.” The process from the moment Diwakaran wrote her first note on a piece of sheet music to the moment she pressed send to the competition judges took almost a year. It included
hours of writing the notes, getting the specific dynamics right and perfecting each phrase. “I’ve always liked composing music,” Diwakaran said, “but the actual editing took longer than the actual writing.” Diwakaran’s favorite type of music to play is modern music, also known as new age music. She prefers modern over classical because modern is typically softer, slower and more emotional, unlike classical music which is typically louder and faster. “I really like the emotion you can put into the piece,” Diwakaran said. “You can get lost in it.” Over the course of the years, Diwakaran has compiled over 100 drafts of short melodies and has fully completed five pieces of music. Of those short melodies, some of them are for the guitar with vocal accompaniment and others are for the piano. “I would mainly write songs, both for singing and guitar, but when this competition came out, I thought [that since] I’m stronger in composing and writing piano music, I [should] just stick with writing on the piano,” Diwakaran said. “I was playing around with which song to enter, but in the end I decided [“Reve Eternal”] was my strongest piece.” Diwakaran began taking piano lessons when she was five years old. She followed in the footsteps of her older sister, Diya Diwakaran, who started playing the piano three years earlier. “The process of writing came really
easily for her. When you have a vision and something in your head, it flows,” Diya said. “When she came out with that piece [for the competition], I was like ‘What the heck?’ It was really good and I knew she could sing and dance, but writing music is really cool.” Ovya has many abilities in music and performing. Among these abilities are singing and learning new things quickly. “Ovya’s very talented,” senior and member of Viva Voce Lucy Yue said. “She learned how to beatbox in a few weeks after our previous beatboxer graduated.” Ovya also enjoys being up on stage and performing. She looks forward to the possibility of entering more competitions of originally composed music so that she can get the opportunity to perform it for the public, which she was not able to do with “Reve Eternal.” “I performed it, audio recorded it and sent in the sheet music,” Ovya said. For now, Ovya has a few possible competitions on her radar, but she hasn’t decided about entering any yet. She is enjoying the feeling of her second place victory with “Reve Eternal” and looks forward to what is to come. Her zest for music and performing is flourishing with every new piece of music she plays or song she sings. “I love performing,” Ovya said. “I love being on stage and just showing people what I can do.” p
