Susanna Hancock (left) and Seare Ahmad Farhat (right) will live in Louisville during their residency with the Louisville Orchestra(Randy Blevins / Provided)At the start of its season, the Louisville Orchestra selects two composers to join the Creator Corps program. The cohort moves to the Shelby Par k neighborhood, joins the orchestra’s full-time staff and spends the next year creating new works and forging relationships with community members.Program manager Jacob Gotlib helped build the program in 2022 along with music director Teddy Abrams.“It's been really inspiring to see this sort of new path develop for what a composer can be in the world, in their communities, in their societies,” Gotlib said.This year, Gotlib and the orchestra selected Susanna Hancock and Seare Ahmed Farhat. Both composers have substantial musical careers, and are inspired by genres beyond classical.Susanna HancockThe summer “The Dark Knight” released in theaters, changed everything for Susanna Hancock.“I had never really heard anything remotely close to new music, avant-garde music,” she said. “But hearing the kinds of sounds that Hans Zimmer was making in ‘The Dark Knight,’ like razor blades on violin strings and kind of cool ambient electronic sounds, I was like, ‘I don't know what this is, but I want to do it.’”This “lightbulb moment” led Hancock to an undergraduate degree in acoustic and electronic composition from University of South Florida and a master’s in music theory and composition from New York University.Hancock said her works explore texture, activity and groove while mixing classical and electronic instruments. Her style pulls from math rock, a genre born in the 1970s that blends elements of rock music with unique — and often unpredictable — electronic sounds. The genre often shifts time signatures to briefly quicken or slow the pace of the tune.“There's these cool pulses and currents that happen that basically cause disruption that I think keeps the listener engaged and the experience very fresh throughout,” Hancock said.Her pieces have been performed by the Central Ohio Symphony, the United States Army Band and the Metropolis Ensemble in New York City.From Sept. 17-19, Hancock will premiere her new works “Together” in Louisville. They’re based on her experience writing music during the pandemic, when audiences could not gather to hear it live.“‘Together’ kind of starts with a very static texture,” Hancock said. “There's not a lot going on. The strings are doing high harmonics, and it's meant to evoke a very placid sense of like nothing's happening, like a tumbleweed going across the street in March 2020, and slowly over time, different instrument families wake up, almost like a spring awakening.”Resident conductor Gabe Lefkowitz will lead the orchestra through the piece on the orchestra’s In Harmony Tour. Lefkowitz will also conduct a new version of Hancock’s “Groundswell” with a full orchestra in February.As part of the Creator Corps, composers also collaborate with local organizations and create community projects.Hancock will host a ceramic instrument-making workshop for children and their families on Sept. 20 at Side by Side Studios on Frankfort Avenue. From this collaboration, Hancock will compose a new work with sounds from the students’ homemade instruments to be performed in March.“I want to help people learn how to make music themselves,’ Hancock said. “I think in some ways clay is a low-barrier entry point because some people look at a violin and say, ‘I could never do that.’ But if you're making your own musical instrument, maybe that's like a shaker or an ocarina. There's not as much precedent for that.”She will also lead shorter workshops at some stops on the In Harmony Tour.Seare Ahmed FarhatAs a child, Seare Ahmed Farhat was always immersed in music, he said. Farhat’s family is from Afghanistan, and he said music is part of a family tradition.“We'd be sitting around in the house or in a celebration, and songs would just be a part of that,” he said. “So I learned a lot of folk tunes that way, and played music in all these celebrations that we had, and that was kind of my origin story as a musician.”Farhat joined a Fleet Foxes cover band later in life, allowing him to experiment with guitar and his voice, he said. Then, he said he fell in love with classical choral music in college while earning a degree in mathematics from Oberlin College in Ohio.“There are these like many different parts of my life that have all come together in this sort of smorgasbord that is my creative interests, and I kind of love how messy it is,” Farhat said. “I don't like really being pinned down.”Farhat’s analytical mind and mathematical knowledge blend into his compositions, he said.“It's all about creativity, and it's all about finding a way to suggest your ideas through logic in creative and expressive ways,” he said.He is also influenced by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti and English polyphony, a classical musical style that plays two simultaneous melody lines, which was popularized during the Medieval period.Farhat’s work has been commissioned by the Longleash Ensemble, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra based in Ithaca, New York, and the Moscow New Music Ensemble in Russia, among others.In November, Farhat will premiere a new version of “Moved by the Beauty of the Trees,” a work influenced by an Ishion Hutchinson poem of the same name. Baritone Jean Bernard Cerin will perform the piece with a full orchestra.“It's hard to pinpoint exactly what's causing this person, the subject of the poem, to stop and be moved by [the trees], and so the piece itself aims to place the audience in that sense of wonderment that the subject of the poem is also feeling,” Farhat said.He will also compose two new works to be played by a full orchestra. One will premiere in February on the In Harmony Tour and will be conducted by Abrams. Farhat said he is currently working on this piece and he hopes to connect with southwestern Kentuckians to complete it.He was inspired by “Between the Rivers,” a documentary about how hundreds of families in the area were forcibly removed from their homes during a government construction project.Farhat will premiere the other new work in March.For his community project, Farhat will lead a homemade electronic instrument-making workshop in partnership with the Louisville Academy of Music.“It could be like taking a speaker out of an old sort of broken loudspeaker that you have in your house and rigging the power supply so that you start to make it vibrate as if it was an instrument,” he said. “So it's all about reappropriating instruments or objects that are electronics around the house to repurpose them for expressive capabilities.”He also plans to collaborate with Americana World Community Center to host a storytelling and poetry event with the local Afghan community. Farhat said that idea came from his family memories and traditions.“We'd often find ourselves in situations where we'd be drinking tea way late into the night and sharing poetry, and singing songs and it was this sort of microcosm of a culture that we were displaced from, and trying to keep it alive was a really specific practice,” he said.He said he hopes his project will give Afghans in Louisville a place and the means to enjoy those traditions. ...read more read less