Napier student named composer of the year

A student at Napier University has been named Sibelius student composer of the Year 2008.

Steven Kelly, 18, was awarded the top prize in the Film composition category, whose judges this year included composers David Arnold and Dario Marianelli, famous most recently for the films James Bond: Quantum of Solace and Atonement respectively.

Another student, Josh Sabin, was among the seven students shortlisted for this prestigious prize. Both are students at Napier's School of Music, which offers several modules in writing all kinds of music.

The school's composer in residence and Steven's composition tutor, Kenneth Dempster, praised the teenager's potential: "Steven is a talented young composer with a natural ability to capture instantly in his music a powerful and distinctive mood. Receiving this award is a dream come true for a composer at the outset of his career – his CV is already beginning to look impressive!'

The film category of the competition required entrants to compose a short piece of music to accompany a film clip, not of their choosing, requiring not just the ability to write music, but to capture the mood and atmosphere of the film as well.

Dempster believes that Steven has a "kind of 'visual' musical imagination, [which] means that scoring for film comes quite naturally to him."

With esteemed composers already acknowledging their work, both Steven and Josh can look forward to careers in composing, with possibilities ranging from pop-song writing to scoring for the growing video game industry.

The competition, now entering its third year, attracted more than 1,800 entries for its three categories: film, classical/contemporary, and jazz, each category being open to two age groups, 10-16 and 17-18.

Sibelius are the makers of music composition and scoring software used widely in schools and universities across the country. As organisers of the competition, they have expressed an aim "to highlight the growing importance of technology in unleashing musical creativity in young people."

Sibelius, and other programmes like it, have changed the nature of composition in the last decade, allowing full-blown orchestral scores to be realized without the need to record a single instrument. Such software does away with much of the technical difficulty involved composition, freeing and speeding up the creative process.

No doubt this is a major factor in what David Arnold claims to have been a "really extraordinarily high" standard of entries, with composers as young as 15 winning their category.