Rivers Student Hailed as “Modern-Day Mozart” on Boston TV News

For Apsara Balamurugan ’20, the plight of refugees is no mere abstraction. Her parents came to this country from Sri Lanka, and their experiences were the inspiration for Balamurugan’s moving and ambitious musical composition, Displaced.
“The subject is a very personal thing for me. I wanted to pay homage to the refugee crisis by blending musical styles—classical, choral, and jazz—because the refugee crisis is a mixing of cultures,” the young composer, a student in the Conservatory Program at Rivers, said in a conservatory newsletter article. The piece has been performed several times by an ensemble of 45 students, notably at the conservatory’s 41st annual Seminar on Contemporary Music for the Young in early April.

Balamurugan’s work has begun to attract notice outside of Rivers. On April 4, when the piece was performed at an all-school meeting, a crew from WCVB, Boston’s ABC affiliate, was on hand to film a segment for the news channel’s “A Plus” feature, which highlights student achievements. The segment, which aired on April 17, called Balamurugan a “modern-day Mozart,” noting that “composing music is something most of us can’t even wrap our heads around.”

“I’ve been composing for seven years now,” the 16-year-old Balamurugan told WCVB reporter Antoinette Antonio. Displaced, written in several genres and for multiple instruments and voices, was a challenge for composer and performers alike. Getting the student musicians to learn the music was no easy feat. But, as Balamurugan told Antonio, “They’re amazing and talented and always put their whole heart into their performances.”

At the April 4 performance in Kraft Dining Hall, the audience listened in rapt silence, and a few listeners were visibly moved to tears as they listened to the piece’s haunting words, “Where am I? Where am I going?” The refugee crisis may be politically divisive, but the music seemed to fulfill Balamurugan’s wish, stated as she introduced Displaced: “I hope as you listen to this piece you will forget about all the labels and listen with your heart.”

To view the WCVB segment on Balamurugan, click here. To view our SmugMug gallery of photos from the performance, click here. And to watch an edited video of Displaced on Rivers’s YouTube channel, click here.
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