Concentrations:
Music | Computer Science
Music Awards:
2023 Coolidge Premium
2021 Margery MacColl Award
Honors in Music Thesis:
“Odyssey”
For my senior honors thesis, I present a score for a 9.5 minute symphonic composition titled “Odyssey”. This piece is inspired by my memories and emotions that I have experienced during my undergraduate years at Brown University. Through working on this thesis, I took the time to create a larger scale piece, and experiment with the instrumentation and music styles, to better tell a connected story of growth and emotions through composition.
The piece will consist of four movements, each representing a year at Brown. The piece aims to portray the different feelings and experiences such as adapting, companionship, happiness, comfort, loneliness, challenges, and growth since high school. Various music styles such as jazz and serialism are incorporated.
Personal Statement:
Rachel Ma, from Toronto, Canada, is a double concentrator in CS and Music. She began playing classical piano when she was 5. At Brown, she plays piano as a soloist, a chamber musician in a piano trio, and a few times as an accompanist. She also brought out her violin for one semester for a Conducting class. She has been composing since high school, and found opportunities to continue at Brown, and composed an orchestral piece to be read by the BUO for her honors! She has also found ways to also intersect her passions in CS and Music in some of her robotics research, where in one project, she worked with dancing robots which utilize music, deep learning, and robotics.