Growing up, innovative composer Charles Peck took piano lessons, excelling at classical music and adding French horn to his repertoire. When he wasn’t practicing scales, he was writing bits of music.
But he never considered composition a potential profession until high school, when he was looking for a break from the classical canon and landed on the electric bass.
“That was an awakening for me,” says Peck, an adjunct assistant professor of music at the University of the Arts who lives in Morton, Pennsylvania. “In classical music, all of the training is preparing you to perform something on the page in front of you. That’s not the case with electric bass.” He ended up recording a progressive rock album with a band of buddies — and kindling his love for composing.
Peck, who recently completed a music composition doctorate from Cornell University, has created works described as “daring” by the Philadelphia Inquirer and “wild and shimmering” by the Broad Street Review. His chamber and large ensemble pieces, he says, combine “the two sides of my personality” — modern classical music and progressive rock energy — and have been performed by the Minnesota Orchestra and the Albany and Columbus symphonies, among others.
“It’s a different mindset,” he says of composing. “I’m kind of obsessive about details. Composition, at least the way I approach it, really resonates with that. I feel I can justify all the notes on a page and am rewarded by the structures I set up or the thematic material.”
At Drexel, Peck’s passion was nourished in courses on song writing and scoring for films. The late Myron Moss, an associate professor who directed band, was a pivotal mentor, Peck says, serving as his adviser for an independent study of scores and his senior thesis.
Peck often explores unusual sounds and contrasts high energy rhythmic movement with ethereal moments. His “Vinyl,” a chamber orchestra piece, imitates the skips and pitch warping of vinyl records. It was awarded an American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Morton Gould Young Composer Award in 2018 and has been performed at the Beijing Modern Music Festival. Australian music magazine CutCommon described his “Sunburst” ensemble piece performed in Melbourne in 2018 as “stunning,” with its combination of “rich and loud and then so very quiet.”
“I think a lot about direction in music,” he says. “I want you to be engaged the whole time, so you have that sense of being really pushed toward something… that you strove for something.”