Given that Mozart and many other great composers have been dead for years, music students seldom get the opportunity to work directly with the composer of the music they are practicing. NEIU students, however, got that chance last month, when Tony-winner Jason Robert Brown visited the NEIU campus to teach a master class.

On November 20, four students in the department of music - Julie Crossen, Michelle Jacobson, David Mitchell, and Drew Waters - graced the Recital Hall stage before an audience prepared to work on selections from the scores of Broadway musicals composed by Brown.

Brown is best known as the composer and lyricist of the musicals "The Last Five Years," which was cited as one of Time magazine's "10 Best of 2001" and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics, and "Parade," which garnered a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award and New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best New Musical.

Crossen, who also served as musical director for Stage Center Theatre's recent production of "Lucky Stiff," said of the master class, "Working with Jason Robert Brown gave me new insight on how to approach a piece of music for the theater. Not only do his intricate rhythms and harmonic structure support the text, the text must be the starting point for all singer/actors who want to really understand and clearly perform his work.

She continued, NEIU's master class with him was quite an accomplishment for the school, and hopefully the beginning of new opportunities to harness the creative power of music and theater to teach and inspire learning."