Zack Pentecost (1990)

Introduction


In 1990, Zack Pentecost was born in Springfield, Tennessee. His musical career started at age 10 with him learning to play electric guitar. Pentecost enjoyed playing guitar for several years. In fact, in high school he played for his schools jazz band as well as with a rock band he and his friends started. However, up until his senior year of high school, music was really just a hobby and something he did for fun. His senior year this all changed though when he took a music theory class. In this class each student had to compose their own piece and which was then read by the high school’s concert band. From here on, Zack as hitched. He had been bitten by the composition bug and had no desire to find a cure to this itch. Thus, when he headed off to Austin Peay State University the next year, it was for a degree in music composition. While there he had a brief stint with the universities jaxx combo, but soon decided to switch from electric guitar to classical guitar. He wrote several works for guitar, before deciding that he wanted composing to take a bigger focus in his life than performing. This shift in focus is what helped him become the first ever student to win the “Benjamin Toxlar Composition Award” twice.

After graduating from APSU, Zack began studying at University of Tennessee, Knoxville for his masters. During his time here he completed his masters thesis – "String Quartet" which in 2014 was featured by the Southeastern Composers League.

In 2017, Pentecost completed his PhD in Music Composition, at University of Minnesota and finished a recording project with MPLS of his dissertation - a collection of songs for choir and electronics.

Works
Fantasy and Reflections on an Air (2014)

Guitar Quartet (2011)

Postlude:1602/1623 (2016)

Interlude:1882 (2016)

Steel Wheels (2014)

Short Story (2015)

Novellete (2012)

Passages (2017)

Work I heard:

At the 2017 Alba International Music Festival I heard Transient Canvas perform Passages. This song had a strong beat with deep tones and a dysfunctional rhythm near the middle. It is almost mechanical but has ideas in the intro that keep coming back. Overall, it really gave the audience members the sensation they would feel during new journeys, fresh starts, scary beginnings, and adventuring into unknown territories, which is exactly what Passages was trying to portray. It ends abruptly reminding the listeners that you don't always know where the passage leads, or where it ends.



Comparisons
Zack himself has said that his is quite different than most other composers his age, however, he says that this is because nearly all composers today are very different from each other. "It's like we are throwing things at the wall and just waiting to see what sticks." It is hard to neatly define his music as one type though because as he is still a relatively new composer his style is still being developed and shifting.

Observations
As a young composer his style has shifted here and there throughout his compositions, however, he maintains true to his strong beat and intentional rhythms. His songs although they may differ in style always seem to tell the story they are trying to tell quite effectively, no matter what method is used to transcribe them.