At SFCM, students don't only get to hear their professors' new works: They get to premiere them.

For Pre-College faculty (and Composition alum) Michael Kaulkin's students, this chance came in April, with the performance of Kaulkin's "Most This Amazing," a setting of a beloved E. E. Cummings poem for choir, two pianos, and percussion. Just a week later, Kaulkin celebrated another achievement: His String Quartet No. 1 ("City Walks")  was released on Throughlines, a collection of contemporary classical works out on Navona Records.

"Mostly, when I was in my teens, I wanted to be Stephen Sondheim when I grew up," Kaulkin recalls of his early musical influences. (Working on a high school production of Sweeney Todd that was quickly shut down by the administration once they discovered its actual content is a formative memory for him.) "I approach everything—all the concert music and choral music I've written—from a sort of theatrical point of view, even if it's below the surface. I'm absolutely positive that goes back to that."

Kaulkin studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest before coming to SFCM for his master's in composition studying under Conrad Susa. "He and I were very well matched because he was such a theater guy," Kaulkin recalls. "My arrival was just on the heels of the opening of his opera The Dangerous Liaisons in 1994. That was just a perfect match just because I don't know how many of the other students at the time were that theatrically oriented; he and I kind of spoke the same language."

Kaulkin continued writing after he graduated in 1996, but taught himself how to build websites as the dot-com rush of the late '90s began, a career that lasted around 20 years. However, around 2000, he was recommended to Scott Cmiel (then the musicianship chair of the Pre-College) and subsequently spent a year teaching musicianship in SFCM's Pre-College.

"I loved it," he remembers. "I had that busy day job, and it was a lot adding Saturdays at Pre-College, and so I had to give it up. Every time I saw Scott, I told him how much I regretted it at the time, and then he invited me back in 2008, and that's what I've been doing ever since."

The Navona Records recording session for Michael Kaulkin's "City Walks."

"Most This Amazing" dates back to 1999. Originally a commission, the piece didn't make it to a live premiere at the time, and Kaulkin has worked since then to get it performed, partly because of the unusual requirements of two pianos and percussion. Talking with Lukáš Janata, who runs the Pre-College Collegium Choir, earlier this year, Kaulkin recalls showing Janata the piece without any expectation it would actually be performed. "He just said, 'I think we can do this.' And that's such a great feeling, especially for this piece that I'm really proud of and that I had so much trouble for years making happen. I'll never be able to thank him enough for taking that on."

With the "Most This Amazing" premiere and the string quartet out in the world, Kaulkin says he hopes his students can now see firsthand a track they can follow. "It's important for them, especially the younger ones, to see an example of something out in the wild that's not just in the confines of their academic setting. I don't really make a big deal out of crowing about my own pieces to my students, so regardless of the work itself, it's just the fact that there is an example of how this whole process works."

Learn more about studying the SFCM Pre-College or studying Composition at the undergraduate and graduate level.