Music students, planetarium collaborate in The Book of Fixed Stars

The Book of Fixed Stars

On Sunday February 22, Colin Hochstetler, an Illinois School of Music graduate student in musicology, and Hayden Mesnick, graduate student at the University of Guelph, premiered Hayden Mesnick’s piece, The Book of Fixed Stars. This work, for a variable number of accordionists ranging from two to eight, was performed by an accordion octet made up of UIUC faculty, students, and CU community members. The evening began with a lecture by Colin and Hayden, offering insight into the composition and its cosmic inspiration. The score was recreated and projected onto the dome so the audience could see exactly how the musicians were “reading” and presenting the night sky. The U of I Improvisers Exchange Ensemble, directed by Jason Finkelman, also participated, performing their own quartet improv set before collaborating with the accordion ensemble on the finale.

Instead of using conventional notation, The Book of Fixed Stars uses the night sky as the musical score. A sky chart (showing constellation boundaries) is split into eight segments, each with their own musical parameters. Each accordionist is assigned a sky segment at the start of the work and moves through it, from outside in, at their own pace. After completing their segment, each performer moves onto the next, and this continues until the conclusion. Each segment receives a unique drone pitch to be sustained by the accordionist’s left hand. With their right hand (the accordion’s keyboard), accordionist “read” each star in the night sky. The pitch of each star is determined by the constellation boundary in which it is located. The volume and duration at which each star is to be played is determined by astronomical data (the star’s brightness): the bigger the star is on the paper, the brighter it is in real life, thus the longer and louder it should be played.

The piece instructs accordionists to surround an audience, ideally outside when stars are visible. Since cold weather and light pollution are significant inhibitors of this, the Staerkel Planetarium was the perfect venue for the performance. Colin Hochstetler worked with Erik Johnson and Waylena McCully at the Staerkel Planetarium to determine how and where accordionists would be stationed around the edge of the planetarium’s dome. The audience experienced accordion sounds coming from all directions around them. Waylena manually reproduced the score of Book of Fixed Stars on the dome using the planetarium’s digital software, so as the accordionists are performing, the audience saw the night sky above. The projection slowly rotated to visually represent each performer rotating through their segments of the sky.

The free improvisation following the Book of Fixed Stars this was a short collaboration between Colin and Hayden on accordions, Jason Finkelman on jaw harp (or other instruments to be determined), and Maxwell Miller, a student member of the Improvisers Exchange Ensemble, who electronically manipulated sounds. Erik Johnson freely controlled geometric patterns on the dome above, which performers interacted with.

The third performance on the program featured the Improvisers Exchange Ensemble. On instruments like trumpets, horns, flutes, bass, voice, percussion, and more, members played a free improvisation guided by surreal imagery on the planetarium dome. This imagery included things like 1) a simulation of star-forming gas clouds that split into abstract rings and 2) nighttime stars mixed with daytime clouds and fish that all smear together.

Finally, to conclude the concert, the accordionists and Ensemble joined together to perform Hayden’s Drone Piece. The piece was accompanied by a slow-moving 20-minute zoom from the Milky Way to the Earth on the dome above. Audience members were encouraged to engage with the material and contribute to the sonic environment by making sounds with their own personal items.

Colin’s pre-concert talk shared details about how planetariums have been used as concert venues in the past. He also discussed the collaboration in general, which connects to his in-progress master’s thesis. He encouraged audience members to look up at night sky and resonate with the stars or the universe in their own way. Hayden’s pre-concert talk shared details about his compositional process and his research in improvisation, creative notation, and choice-making in music. He also went over how the Book of Fixed Stars works and how it has been reproduced on the dome.

The event sold out, with around 70 audience members showing up. The concert project received co-sponsorship ($1,000) from the Office for Arts Integration at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. News articles about the piece were featured on Parkland College’s news, Chambana Today, WIXY, National Today, and the UIUC Musicology Instagram page,

Project Background

by Colin Hochstetler

Hayden and I (Colin) both completed our undergraduate degrees at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). We have been longtime friends and collaborators; for example, we co-founded the Student Organization for Music Research at BGSU and ran a polka band together for some time after I graduated. Hayden wrote and dedicated The Book of Fixed Stars to me in 2024.

One night in September 2025, after I had viewed the film screening of Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros in the Spurlock Museum hosted by Jason Finkelman, Hayden called me and pitched the possibility of putting on a concert for The Book of Fixed Stars. Feeling inspired by the film, I immediately said yes. We were initially open to looking for any and all venues, but with my connection to the planetarium I was hopeful we might be able to put it on there. They graciously agreed to host. Shortly after, Hayden and I reached out to Jason Finkelman and asked if the Improvisers Exchange Ensemble might want to get involved. Beyond agreeing to get involved, Jason quickly became a mentor, guiding me in this process of concert organizing, something I had never previously done. I also managed to recruit the other six accordionists we would need for the performance, all located in the Champaign-Urbana area. Now, this concert is an art/science collaboration that seeks to creatively showcase improvised, drone, and avant garde music alongside the unique projection capabilities of the planetarium.

Artist and Collaborator Biographies

Colin Hochstetler

Colin Hochstetler is an MM Musicology student supported by the Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities & Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He holds a B.M. in Music History and Literature from Bowling Green State University (BGSU). Colin’s research is centered around music and science communication with a focus on music in historical U.S. planetarium programs. For his master’s thesis, he is studying a series of electronic music and projection arts planetarium concerts, titled Vortex, that the composer Henry Jacobs hosted in San Francisco in the 1950s. Other interests include space music, film music, and sonification.

Colin has presented papers at conferences hosted by the American Musicological Society’s Midwest Chapter (AMS-MW) and the Great Lakes Planetarium Association. He has also been invited to give private and public talks, recently being a featured presenter for the Eclipse Speaker Series hosted by the BGSU Planetarium. In 2024, Colin received the Outstanding Student Paper Prize from the AMS-MW, the Indiana University Press Student Paper Award, and the Budds Student Award for his paper titled “Establishing Musical Aesthetics in Planetarium Productions: Classical Music and the Space Race at the Adler Planetarium.” He currently serves as Student Representative of AMS-MW.

Alongside musicology, Colin also engages with librarianship and performance. He has served as an Ensemble Library Intern at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, the Polka Preservation Assistant at the Music Library and Bill Schurk Sound Archives at BGSU, and most recently a Junior Fellow for the Library of Congress at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. His polka-themed paper co-presented at the Midwest Music Library Association’s Fall 2024 conference won the “Best of Chapter” award, and he continues to study polka as an accordionist in Champaign-Urbana.

Hayden Mesnick

Hayden Mesnick (he/they; b. 2002) is a composer, pianist, accordionist, and curator based in Guelph, Ontario, where he is pursuing a PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation. He received his B.M. in Music Composition from Bowling Green State University, where he studied composition with Piyawat Louilarpprasert, Elainie Lillios, Mikel Kuehn, Marilyn Shrude, and Christopher Dietz; and piano with Ariel Kasler and Yevgeny Yontov. Hayden’s compositional work frequently centers on the development of notational and creative systems for choice-making performers to construct ambient, polystylistic, and absurd performances. His music has been premiered by individuals and ensembles such as Cerulean Trio, FLYDLPHN, Joshua Lyphout, Abigail Petersen, and Tacet(i).

As a performer, Hayden has premiered his own compositions as well as works by Alric Godfrey, JD Fuller, Joseph Miller, Elijah Stewart, and others. Ensembles he has worked with include BGSU’s Middle Eastern, Early Music, and New Music Ensembles, Black Swamp Polka Collective, dmg quintet, One Billion Lions, and Sankofa Sounds. His musical background is diverse, spanning jazz, free improvisation, contemporary concert music, polka, and more. For more details, visit https://haydenmesnick.com

Huge congrats to Colin, Hayden, Prof. Finkelman, and all the musicians from the accordion ensemble and the U of I Improvisers Exchange Ensemble for creating this unforgettable cosmic experience!