As you might have heard, Dr. Sharpe is retiring from Drury at the end of the semester. Zach Daniels and I (Kyle Vanderburg) are putting together a secret project for his former students to write piano miniatures, compile quotes, or otherwise in his honor. We’ll take all that content and bind it all into a printed book that will be presented to him in late spring.
My other mentor, Marvin Lamb at Oklahoma, retired this fall. We did a piano miniature project for him, and it was a resounding success. We were able to get a group of former students together in Norman to present it to him. There’s more info on that project here.
We're looking for as many former students as possible to share Sharpeisms, quotes, memories, and well-wishes. Send those (and your name, major, and graduation year) on over to kyle.vanderburg@ndsu.edu or zach@divisilabs.com and we'll get them in the queue.
The piano miniatures would be at most 2 minutes in duration.
In terms of timeline, I’d like to have the pieces in hand by April 1. This gives us a couple of weeks for wiggle room, because I’d like to get the book to the printers by April 15. I’ll handle the manufacturing and distributing.
On the legal and commercial side of things, I don’t have any plans at this point to offer the collection commercially. If there’s interest after the project, that will be a whole separate conversation. Composers will retain their copyrights, you’re essentially licensing your work for inclusion in this collection.
At this point, we're looking for contributors and for interest. Neither of us has a full list of Sharpe students. If you could reach out to alums you’re close to, either with your own pitch or by forwarding this page, I would appreciate it. If you're interested in contributing, please drop me a line at kyle.vanderburg@ndsu.edu or to Zach at zach@divisilabs.com, that would be superb.
We'll cover the cost of having the books printed, unless it gets prohibitively expensive. If you contribute, you're welcome to a copy, but we'll ask that you pay postage.
For the cover, we're looking to replicate Dr. Sharpe's 40th birthday shirts from 2005. Or maybe a sweater. We'll assembling the book in Affinity Publisher, and printing the books with a commercial book printer.