On Sunday evening, Kulas Recital Hall played host to a concert of five vocal pieces by five student composers. The pieces were a product of Oberlin in Italy, an intense, month-long residency program in Urbania where musicians learned Italian in the morning and played music for the rest of the day.

Primarily geared toward opera performance, the program included composers for the first time this June. The pioneering five, juniors Steven Bergdall, Emily Clark and Tim McCormack and sophomores Pei-Jung Lee and Ralph Lewis, had mixed feelings about the program.

The composers were very happy about all the time they had to write, something lost during the hustle and bustle of the regular school year. During normal classes, space in which to work in was often hard to come by, though, as were performers, who were busy with their own intense schedule.

Lee, a native of Taiwan, commented on the culture shock of being in such a different environment. Lewis noticed this, too, especially during the Italian language classes.

“To go from Oberlin faculty to intelligent Italian supermodels was a bit tough,” he commented, “but it was a challenge we were all willing to accept.”

The composers made the trip with Professor Randy Coleman of the composition department. Coleman held group classes and private lessons with his students, who were expected to write a piece each week and also had to give presentations about other composers’ works. Since they were living in the birthplace of the Bel Canto song style, it seemed natural that the composers focused on vocal music.

The results were very diverse. Lewis, whose piece was first on the program, knew that he wanted to write a song and not just a vocal piece.

“I kept imagining some guy in a rustic town singing,” he said, and the image produced “Parlour-Piece,” a setting of a Ted Hughes poem for unaccompanied bass-baritone.

The piece was ambiguously tonal and mostly quiet. Lewis’s main concern when writing it was “to provide a separate understanding of the text.” He succeeded. His writing, and performer Kevin Ray’s admirable singing, worked together to communicate the poem.

Lee was also preoccupied with effectively conveying the text. “This is My Letter to the World,” for soprano and piano, a setting of an Emily Dickinson poem, was the most traditional piece on the program. To communicate the conflicted nature of the poem, Lee wrote consonant music beneath the odd numbered lines of poetry and dissonant music beneath the even lines.

She found other ways of reflecting the text with her music. When soprano Sarah Klauer sang the phrase “I cannot see,” for instance, Titus Vettrus played a series of disjoint chords on the piano to increase the uneasiness of the text.

For the other three composers, the text was less of a concern.

“I wanted to focus on the sounds of the words, not their meaning,” said Clark, whose piece, “The Locust Tree in Flower,” was a setting of a William Carlos Williams poem for soprano and trumpet. The piece was an experiment in how the two seemingly incongruous performers could cross, so the text was secondary. What resulted was a dialogue between the two performers, Amy O’Callaghan and Jonah Kappraff, full of bold dissonances.

By the end of the piece, Clark had brought the two together well, closing with the soprano and trumpet both holding a note but sliding in and out of unison with each other.

McCormack chose to set a short e.e. cummings poem. “l(a” used the traditional voice and piano pairing, but there was nothing else traditional about the piece.

The text was broken down into monosyllables, which appeared in different orders throughout the piece.

Meanwhile, the piano barely played during the work, and when it did, it was kept separate from the voice (Ray once again). McCormack referred to the piece as a “voice solo” in fact. Rhythmically, the piece was very complicated, but one wouldn’t have been able to tell simply by listening to it. Why write it that way, then, especially for a vocalist, traditionally the most rhythmically untrustworthy type of performer?

“It’s for the psychological effect,” explained McCormack, who cites Brian Fernyhough, a composer of similarly complex music, as his biggest influence. “Who cares about something that’s predictable? Who cares about an eighth note anymore?”

Bergdall certainly doesn’t care about the predictable. His piece, “[et]ude” for two female voices, didn’t even draw from a poem for its text. He simply used various monosyllables, predominantly “eh,” to create a musical drama that was a “purely sonic” and not cerebral experience.

He was interested in vocal gestures outside of text. Mostly, the performers were working off general contours of sound, not specific notes, and they were sometimes called to improvise. The piece was captivating and brilliantly performed by Amy O’Callaghan and Indra Raj.