<p>The first piece was a short piano solo. Since my son is a pianist, he has many piano pieces already prepared, but I think his result was started fresh there. They wrote it the first day, got feedback, edited, briefly went over it with a phenomenal professional pianist, who performed and recorded it the second day. The next two pieces, they were given a theme to work with and specific instruments. For instance, I think one was marimba and clarinet. They went to an art museum and saw kinetic sculptures and wrote a piece inspired by that. They work shopped them with the professionals, one was recorded the first week, the next one the middle of the second week. The final one was a string quartet (maybe quintet?) recorded at the final performance. None of the pieces were very long, I think his ranged from 2-7 minutes, but that fit the guidelines perfectly for what schools asked him to submit. He also has a couple longer, more in depth choral and orchestral pieces he included with them in his portfolio. It is definitely a program for advanced high school composers who can notate quickly and accurately (it is not the time to learn how to use notation software) and who go into it with some solid ideas they can flesh out during the program amd are willing to work within the assigned parameters. When he got there and heard the schedule, he felt a little overwhelmed, and he slept very little during the two weeks, but the results are honestly better than I ever could have imagined they would be in such a short time. It was also very cool to hear how 6 students wrote pieces for the same instruments with the same basic theme, and ended up with 6 completely unique pieces. The professional musicians they brought in were all outstanding and it was a great experience to be able to work hand in hand with them.</p>