Arts and Culture

Meet a young Kelowna musician who's found his forte

One of the stories on Kelowna10 that had people talking.

Music written by high school senior hits the big stage.

  • Grade 12 RSS student has own work played professionally
  • Continued to write music during the pandemic

A Kelowna teenager is hitting the right notes when it comes to his dreams.

Musician and grade 12 student Dryden Bennett, recently got to see one of his goals achieved. His own written work was played in a professional setting by the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra (OSO).

The opportunity came through a composition program with the Okanagan Youth Orchestra, where Bennett, who attends Rutland Secondary School, thought it would help him stay in touch with music during the pandemic.

“The end goal of this was to write a piece that the OSO (Okanagan Symphony Orchestra) would read through at a special rehearsal," Bennett said. “I wrote Tangerine Trees, which took me two weeks to write it all down and get the notes on the page. It took me another week to fix it all up and get it ready for the orchestra.”

The music was initially played at a special rehearsal in April.

“A couple months later [Music Director] Rosemary [Thomson] came to me and asked if the OSO could perform my piece in their A New Dawn concert because it fit well with their theme of renewal and reflection,” he said. “Of course, I was like, ‘heck yeah. That sounds awesome.’ I had to fix it up some more and make it ready for an audience.”

Bennett, who has only been in concert band since the ninth grade and has no prior experience, said throughout the pandemic, he’s learned a lot about what music means to him.

“I learned that I have a lot of determination towards music and I will constantly strive to make myself better,” he said. “I wanted to be an engineer, but now I want to be a composer.”

This upcoming weekend, the youth orchestra will be doing another piece written by Dryden called ‘Rain At The End Of Time.’

“This one is much darker, a lot deeper, it has a lot more emotion to it. The one I wrote for the OSO was lighter and uplifting.”

Bennett hopes to attend the University of British Columbia to study musical composition.

Published 2021-11-24 by Connor Chan

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