Manar Hashmi

Manar Hashmi is a composer from South Hadley, Massachusetts. She began her musical career in elementary school as a violinist and multi-string player, and quickly became interested in arranging and composing. She wrote music for numerous school ensembles and theater productions throughout high school, and discovered her love for cinematic music in class one day, when she heard Danny Elfman’s theme music for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” for the first time. She studied contemporary classical composition and film scoring at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley, where her teachers were Joan Tower, Mark Baechle, Missy Mazzoli, James Sizemore, Jessie Montgomery, and George Tsontakis. Recently, she was part of another Lowell-based project, “Measure of Work: Sounds of Labor in Lowell,” which is where she met Marshunda and some of the musicians in the Lowell Philharmonic Orchestra. The LPO is the third orchestra Manar has worked with, and she is extremely excited that she was able to write a piece that blends cinematic-sounding music (specifically of the swashbuckling variety) with live orchestral performance. When she is not composing Manar also works as an engraver and has worked on the proofreading team for a variety of TV shows, movies, and film scores in concert. Her favorite film score of all time is “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Program Notes

“Bopperschnopps” is meant to be fun to play and listen to, with a mix of spooky, jaunty, and epic themes. This piece was inspired by my desire to find adventure in everyday life. After all, the term "swashbuckling," while commonly associated with swords and pirates, also relates to seeking adventure in a confident and sometimes noisy way. The music I wrote when I thought of the word "Bopperschnopps" was music for questing through dense forests and dancing on a ship's deck. It is all-purpose music for finding the fun in the madness, and the whimsical in the everyday. The influences of this piece are numerous: the drum and fife music of the 18th century battlefields, the elegant bass lines of the Late Baroque era, and the jig-like, somewhat dark-sounding "Pirate Music" that we have come to know and love in recent decades. My hope is that this music will be, more than anything, a thrilling adventure. 

NSquared Dance Company