A Greene County Middle School student has done something not many people his age do.

Eighth grader Egan Durbin started writing a song at the beginning of the school year in Band Director Bob Palmer’s honor band prep class as a project, which then became much more, as he developed an entire concert band tune, complete with the different instrument parts. Durbin tells Raccoon Valley Radio how happy he was with how his composition started to the final product.

“After I started making it, I was like really surprised about how it turned out, and I thought it sounded good. So I showed it to Mr. Palmer and asked him that if I made sheet music for it if we could play it with the band? And he agreed to that. And so I started making sheet music for it. It felt pretty good to play something that I made and that I put effort into.” 

Palmer says Durbin relied on some of his friends in the concert band for help initially and also wrote customized parts for them. He talks about how special it is to have one of his students compose a concert band song.

“This is a first in my career opportunity. I actually don’t expect this to happen again. It’s an incredible achievement for a middle school student. The thing I was most surprised was is that so he started sending me things, (and) I was like, ‘Hey, that’s really cool.’ But I thought that would be the end of it. But he kept coming back and he kept coming back, and I was like, ‘Okay, we have a whole concert band piece now.’ So like, what are we doing with this because as soon as he had a whole product, I was like, ‘Let’s play it.’”      

Durbin wants to be a video game developer and to have the ability for songwriting will help his aspirations for that kind of career.

Palmer adds that the song will be performed by the seventh and eighth grade band at their spring concert this Thursday at 6pm at the high school auditorium, along with the fifth grade band and middle school jazz band performing as well. Click here to hear a synthesized version of the song.