During the holiday music concert on Monday, Dec. 6, the Symphony Strings premiered “Whiteboard,” a song from student composer and cellist, Zephaniah Gustafson. During his speech before the song played, Gustafson said “I would like to thank Ms. Gaherty and my peers for going through this process with me and how I, you know, went through and wrote this piece.”

Before introducing “Whiteboard,” Gustafson said “I wrote this for the IB diploma program so there was not much criteria to it but that it must be collaborative. So, I chose to do it with these people.”

When talking about how the name “Whiteboard” came to mind, Gustafson said “the pieces name is whiteboard because as a class, we were trying to figure out a name for the piece because I’m not that creative. So, I gave a survey and one name I really liked was whiteboard.” Gustafson would go on to say, “Ms. Gaherty told us about this one band teacher that used to compose his own songs for his band and he used to just name the songs after random things that he saw around his classroom. So when one kid wrote down whiteboard, I thought it was really nice.”

Gallery • 3 Photos

Nicole Goodman

Zephaniah during his speech.