For the past two years, Texas State University student Jay Nava has stayed up late, writing and typing on his keyboard to draft three and a half hours of original hip-hop and classical music.
It’s all about chamber ensembles, electronic music and live bands performing through the medium of opera.
Nava, who just received his Master of Music degree with a concentration in composition as part of the 2024 spring commencement class, performed his original “hip-hop” composition recital “Realize for Real Here’s” on April 19 in Evans Auditorium. The recital includes approximately 20% of the entire piece.
He decided to pursue his master’s degree at TXST after a professor at Georgetown Southwestern (where he received his undergraduate degree in 2022) told him he should go there.
“I wanted to stay in Central Texas because of all the connections I made in Austin, and Texas seemed like the best place to be because of the composition teachers,” Nava said. “I came here with the mindset that I was going to make the most of every opportunity I had, which is something I didn’t do as an undergrad.”
His hip-hop began as a dream to bring his disparate worlds together by integrating everything he did musically into one piece. He has had an interest in hip-hop and R&B for as long as he can remember, and his passion for classical music grew as he trained as a pianist.
In the summer of 2022, when Nava thought of the word “hip-hop,” he had not yet seen an opera performed on stage.
“I know that opera is a monument to the classical era and that as a genre it still exists today,” he said. “Combining something like this with hip-hop culture is right up my alley. Because of the scale of the production and the fact that people who were important to me were in the story, I had friends come up and play themselves in different scenes of our lives. character of”.
