Technology and Applied Composition student Joi Marchetti's work has already covered the American West, and her next work is set to span the Atlantic Ocean. 

Marchetti (who studies with Daria Novoliantceva), recently traveled to New York to see the Off-Broadway debut of Ain't Done Bad, a 90-minute narrative dance performance based on the dramatic, "spaghetti western"-esque songs of gay country musician Orville Peck. Marchetti composed the original music that acts as interstitials between Peck's songs after working directly with the show's director, choreographer, and star, Jakob Karr. Having debuted on July 9, the show is running through the end of August at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Midtown Manhattan; the New York Times hailed its "engaging storytelling" as "earnest, sometimes sexy and fundamentally sweet."

"During the pandemic, I was out of work, and all my friends in New York who were dancers or musicians were also out of work," Marchetti said. "Jakob was asked to create something for the Orlando Fringe Festival, and he came up with the idea of this show, and I was involved at the very beginning. It was a very small team." In addition to the original music she composed, Marchetti wound up sound designing the entire production during tech week, tuning the space and automating sound under the technical direction of Philip Lupo: "That part of it was somewhat unexpected, and absolutely not something I could have done without what I learned in TAC," she added. 

Marchetti is re-teaming with Karr for her own project, which won the PDEC department's Sky High Award in 2023. Inspired by a trove of hundreds of World War II-era letters between a woman in the States and her deployed love that a friend of Marchetti found at an estate sale. "It's basically the same team [as Ain't Done Bad]," Marchetti said. "Jakob is choreographing again, and it's also going to be a dance narrative," augmented by a chorus and live musicians, as Marchetti jokes, "depending on what we have the budget for."

Marchetti initially began at SFCM in the voice department and worked for years as a professional singer before returning to study in the TAC program." This is the first time I've taken on a project completely from the ground up," she continued. "Finding my voice through the TAC program has been so, so huge for me. You're put in a place where you have no boundaries, so you're creatively limitless and there's no repercussions for how far you go outside of the boundaries or how many rules you break. Because in the real world, there are so many outside factors that affect how you bring something to life—producers, other collaborators, and so on." 

"After years of reading these letters, hundreds of them, I feel like I know more about these people than I do about some of my own family," Marchetti jokes. "When I started Ain't Done Bad with Jakob, I thought, 'Hey, I have this collaborator who works really well with me and is starting to make things happen on their own.' And I told him about this project I had in mind with the letters, and he said, 'Sure, you do the music and I'll do the choreography.'" 

Marchetti recorded the entire show's score with a 10-piece string ensemble (with Ryan Camastral on piano and orchestration—who also studies with Novoliantceva—in SFCM's Studio G in spring 2024) using the PDEC grant to pay for the studio time, musicians, and engineers. The fully realized theatrical production with Karr's choreography and live musicians is still in pre-production, but Marchetti says "Ain't Done Bad was and continues to be an amazing experience, and it was a great run-up to me staging an entire production; I'm really looking forward to seeing this next work realized."

Learn more about studying Technology and Applied Composition at SFCM.