Freshman Menea Kefalov of Ladue Horton Watkins High School has won a prize in the 11th annual 2016 Creating Original Music Project competition conducted by the University of Missouri’s Mizzou New Music Initiative. Her song “I Can’t Take It” was the first place winner in the “High School – Popular” category. This is the fifth time that Menea has written and submitted a song to the program and won a prize!
Menea’s winning composition will be performed at the annual COMP Festival, starting at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, April 16, in the Fine Arts Building on the Mizzou campus. The festival will be audio-streamed online so that relatives, friends, neighbors, classmates and other members of the public can listen from anywhere.
The audio stream will go live 10 minutes before concert time here.
COMP was founded in 2005 to encourage K-12 students in Missouri to write original musical works and to provide performance opportunities for those works, according to a news release. It is a joint venture of the university’s Mizzou New Music Initiative and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, which provides an annual gift of $80,000 to sponsor the competition.
Every year, in addition to having their music performed at the COMP Festival, the winning composers and their schools receive cash prizes, and high school winners also receive a scholarship to attend Mizzou’s high school summer music composition camp.