What is “Ideals for Earnest Youth”? Is it a handbook of life advice for young people written by a conservative Christian writer in 1927? Is it a 2010 musical short film satirically based on the book, made by a bunch of college students? Is it a 2012 full-length stage musical based on the film?

Yes! It even has its own website, where you can read all about it and watch both the film and the stage production. In 2010 student filmmaker Travis Duerksen had the idea of making a short film inspired by the book. Kelly Wolfer composed three songs, and Duerksen wrote the lyrics. I was the music director and a member of the cast. Two years later, the opportunity arose to adapt the film into a full-length stage production. Duerksen and I collaborated on the effort. He wrote the script. I composed the music, adapting songs from the film and creating several new ones, and we wrote the lyrics together. Michael Bodner was the director.

As music director, I pulled together a four-piece band (with the occasional addition of myself on harmonica and pennywhistle), and we had just enough people at cast auditions to fill out the show. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun, and it would go down in history as the first-ever student-written, student-produced musical at Eastern Mennonite University.

My only regret was that we didn’t have time to record a cast album. I wanted to be able to listen to these songs again, so I decided to arrange all ten of them into a medley. As a brass player myself, I chose brass quintet. It turned out great.

So why would you want to play a 15-minute medley of songs from a college musical? Well, because this music is honestly really fun. The songs are in a wide variety of styles. Here are some style indications you’ll encounter in the score:

• Light rock
• Medium rock
• Fast rock
• Intense heavy metal
• Like a kindergarten song
• Jolly hoedown
• Jollier hoedown
• Rollicking Irish pub song
• Intense and mysterious
• Sentimental ballad
• Sweet romantic ballad
• Energetic rock-n-roll
• Barbershop quartet

A portion of the revenue goes to Kelly Wolfer, who composed the songs in the film.