Southeast senior to put stock market to music in recital

Landon Schnurbusch, a fifth-year senior with a double major in musical composition and mathematical actuary science at Southeast Missouri State University, loves music and numbers.

The Cape Girardeau-born student, a 2016 graduate of Perryville, Missouri’s St. Vincent dePaul High School, will get to combine both during his upcoming senior composition recital at 7:30 p.m. April 20 at Shuck Recital Hall on the River Campus.

Using a hybrid piano called a Disklavier, Schnurbusch plans to play a piece he wrote based on the 2008 economic crisis by crunching data culled from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

“I was in fourth or fifth grade when (America) was going through the recession and I was old enough to recognize something bad was going on,” said Schnurbusch, who will graduate from Southeast in May.

“I have data points being changed into musical notes,” Schnurbusch explained about his piece, titled “The Financial Crisis of 2007-2008.”

“Pre-crash, the notes are high, bright and twinkly, but just as the housing bubble burst and the Dow nosedived, the notes will jump down to the low end very quickly, and it’s kind of scary sounding,” he added.

The effect is achieved by using a musical tool first created in 1982, an acoustic piano with, as its maker claims, “a record and playback system unlike any other.”

Unusual instrument

The Disklavier’s manufacturer, Yamaha, refers to the Disklavier on its website as “the world’s most advanced piano.”

Kevin Hampton, chairman of Southeast’s music department, said the Disklavier was one of 40 pianos the university received in July.

“If you walk into the recital hall, the (Disklavier) looks like a normal concert grand piano but it has a couple of black speaker boxes hanging underneath,” said Hampton, who has headed the department since 2013.

“(Disklaviers) are Bluetooth ready and have USB ports, so students can connect their smart devices to them,” he explained, noting a musician can connect a laptop to the hybrid piano and pull up an orchestral accompaniment.

“A solo pianist can sit down at the (Disklavier) and actually play with a full orchestra even though the student is the only musician performing,” Hampton continued.

“Computers are meant to work with data, so, basically, I have the opportunity to have a computer play the instrument, essentially like a player piano,” said Schnurbusch, who admitted writing for the Disklavier is akin to writing computer code.

“With this piano, you’re going away from sheet music where you have to pick out every single note,” he added.

“Composers can write things for the Disklavier that are impossible for humans to play because they have too many notes, too much contrast, are too fast or too complex,” said Robert Fruehwald, a piano and composition instructor at Southeast.

Schnurbusch will also play another one of his compositions, “Random Harmony,” at the recital.

“I composed a program that can take a note as input, then the computer randomly selects a chord progression to go with it and sends that back through the piano,” he said, explaining each time “Random Harmony” is played it will not be the same.

“The computer is choosing the chord,” he said, “and that’s part of the fun.”

“In the composing world, we refer to this as ‘aleatoric’ music, which, if you compare it to gambling, it’s as if each time someone throws a pair of dice, something different comes up,” explained Schnurbusch, who began taking piano lessons at age 5.

Hampton agreed this is “next-generation” music.

“It’s really mind-blowing when you think about it,” he said.

Next steps

Schnurbusch, at least initially, will not try to make music his vocation after graduation.

“I don’t know if I want to be part of the dogfight that goes into getting people to pay attention to my music,” he said, noting his immediate plan after commencement is to work an internship with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City this summer on the organization’s actuarial team.

Schnurbusch said even if his day job takes him away from musical composition, he’ll still think of ways to be musically creative.

“It’s about being expressive and telling stories (and) I’ll find things along the way that interest me,” he said.