The stars in the unpolluted Upland sky may be a routine sight for most of its residents, but for some they are the threads that weave together a compelling self-portrait.
"Nocturne” is an up-and-coming musical that Josiah Friesen, a senior music theory and composition major, has been writing for the past one and a half years. He described it as a journey through the night sky with 18 songs circling around the various themes of the stars.
The plotline is centered around the idea of old memories under the night sky that the sunlight can wipe away, Friesen said.
“Nocturne” begins with a child seeing a shooting star from earth at night. The star comes from the constellation of Perseus, known as the Storyteller. The child is reminded of her own identity through a story she was told at a young age by her father, so she sets off into the stars to find how it ends.
She encounters a barrier when the sunrise hits her in the morning, erasing her memory of the story. The rest of the musical follows her journey from the constellation of Orion to the star clusters of Pleiades, with an encounter in the Milky Way constellation before coming back to the earth.
All of the characters are unnamed and based on archetypes, Friesen said. The child represents what was once a shooting star, while the storyteller portrays the constellation of Perseus and is the father of all shooting stars.
“This story, like so many fairy tales do, serves to explain the natural phenomena,” Friesen said. “It explains why the Perseid meteor shower happens every year—it happens in August because it is the storyteller sending his stories down to his child—he is reminding her about the story that she knew as a child.”
The musical is one of four projects that have been under the umbrella of the faculty-mentored undergraduate scholarship (FMUS) project since the summer of 2024. Friesen has been working closely with Todd Syswerda, an adjunct professor of music composition, songwriting and music technology at Taylor.
Friesen had wanted to write a musical for a long time. But it was on a walk back to Breuninger Hall after dark that he saw music in the sky. He was reminded of Hank Green’s words, “You are the universe experiencing itself,” and lyrics entered his mind.
Bits and pieces of the musical began to take shape for Friesen. On a car ride to pick up his sister at Indiana Wesleyan University, he opened a voice memo and began to speak the details of the story into the recording.
Brenna Moan, a junior music composition major, has known about Friesen’s project since she first met him. During her freshman year, she recalled him telling her that he wanted his senior recital to be a musical.
In the process of working on her own music compositions, Moan said she realized how sharing her music with others was often more like sharing part of herself with them.
“It's a really vulnerable thing to share your music, and there's really nowhere to hide,” she said. “Once you put your music out there, it is showing the world a big part of who you are, and so I think that everyone who comes to it will see him more clearly and have a better understanding of who he is.”
The FMUS scholarship brought Friesen back to Taylor for the months of June and July. During that time, he had a full-time job writing music and dialogue for “Nocturne.”
On crisp summer nights, Friesen would find himself up on the bleachers by the football field, watching Venus come out as the sun set, with a pen in hand.
“Nocturne” is partially inspired by Friesen’s own experiences growing up around the bright lights of Chicago before moving to rural Upland three years ago.
While the experience has been life-changing, Friesen said that growing older with all of life’s distractions has sometimes pulled him away from his roots.
Friesen unpacked an old voice memo from his days in high school to discover a main melody with a melodic tritone structure. He chose the song to represent the child in the musical. Each time it plays, it represents a memory that she has heard and recalled.
Friesen recalled penning the first lyrics for “Nocturne” in March of 2023 before writing his first full song for it during that fall. He is now closing in on the final parts of the musical and has planned a reading of the full script in February of 2025 with a group of instrumentalists that include some of his friends.
“It is a marathon—writing a big project like this,” Syswerda said.
He said that Friesen intricately understands the tapestry of themes he has created and has strong ideas about where notes and lyrics belong. However, it is hard to stay at such a high level of musical intelligence without getting burned out or feeling moments of imposter syndrome.
Syswerda has been working alongside Friesen in pushing past the writing wall, as it is a difficult but necessary journey for a composer and musician.
“I like to imagine that this story is the kind of story that the storyteller would tell to his child,” Friesen said. “‘If you want to find your way home, here's how you can find the North Star: we're going to start at Orion.’”
