Before touching the adjunct professor payroll for the theatre and music departments, even before he attended college, Atkins was composing and arranging pieces of music for various classical ensembles.
“The first piece I arranged [for orchestra] was the theme from Star Wars,” Atkins said, with a chuckle. “Back when I was in seventh or eighth grade, the orchestra from Scribner [Middle School] performed it.”
Atkins began composing original music during his time as a student at New Albany High School. He said high school was when he chose music as his career path.
Atkins said he was conducting a piece that he had written at a choir concert.
“I turned around to acknowledge the applause, and I saw this little old lady crying,” Atkins said. “She came up to me afterwards and said ‘I just want you to know, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard,’ and I thought ‘OK this is what I’m doing.’”
After high school, Atkins received a bachelor’s degree in music composition. He then attended graduate school for music theory and composition. While in graduate school, Atkins won the first ever Indiana Young Composers Competition, a competition in which composers submit music they have written to be judged, with his work for full orchestra, “Paradox.”
It has not been all composing and creating for Atkins, however. After college Atkins worked for various music publishers where he designed and edited sheet music written by various other composers, but it was while working at IU Southeast that Atkins found a new passion.
“I find I really like writing [music] for plays,” Atkins said. “It’s sort of like getting to score a film, but it’s live so it’s a little more difficult.”
Atkins has since started building a name for himself as a theater music composer. He composed an original score to the 2011 IUS production of the play “Equus.” He also worked alongside famous actress Lee Meriwether, who portrayed Catwoman in the original “Batman” movie and was the Miss America winner of 1955.
He composed the music for Meriwether’s one-woman show “The Women of Spoon River: Their Voices from the Hill.” The show was performed at IU Southeast and then ran for a month in Hollywood.
“We still keep in contact,” Atkins said, referencing Meriwether. “She e-mails me, she calls me and I now do her website too. She’s everything you’d want a Miss America to be.”
Aside from his work with Meriwether, Atkins said he is now working with another actress on her show about letters from the Civil War.
Along with his composition career, Atkins still keeps up with the day-to-day happenings of the Music and Theater Departments. He is in charge of a multitude of organizational work behind the scenes of the departments he works for, including keeping student records and taking care of marketing and public relations.
Although it’s not the most creative work, Atkins said that his education as a composer has been helpful in his position at IU Southeast where he deals with music every day.
“The one thing I’ve had to learn is that you have to be flexible in what you expect, and you have to be adaptive,” Atkins said when discussing the various jobs he has held that were not directly related to music composition.
Atkins said it is the feeling he gets when he hears his work performed that keeps him going.
“It’s a real rush,” Atkins said. “It’s validation that you’ve got the process down, and I couldn’t get enough of that.”
By ETHAN FLEMING
Staff
ethflemi@ius.edu
