Grace Miedziak sits with her fellow Authentic Voice commissioned composers during a recent rehearsal with the Metropolitan Youth Symphony in Portland.

Grace Miedziak, 17, has written songs for as long as she can remember.

It started with singing along to Disney films — Miedziak couldn’t help but sing her own melodies and words. By age 7 she got her first keyboard, and while she practiced every night, she spent just as much time making up her own melodies.

Or rather, she translated them from inside her head. Her process is still very similar, whether she’s writing an orchestral piece for the Metropolitan Youth Symphony in Portland or an indie rock-inspired vocal song for her singer-songwriter alter-ego, LAIK.

“I can just be microwaving a bag of popcorn and all of a sudden I get an idea for a melody,” Miedziak said. “And I hear it in my head and I just try to transpose it to the notes on paper. I try to organize it on the paper, but I hear it in my head first.”

Those melodies constantly running through Miedziak’s head have won her some serious recognition from organizations such as the Oregon Music Teachers Association and MYS. And now they’ve landed her her first commissioned, orchestral piece through The Authentic Voice program, a partnership between MYS and Fear No Music’s Young Composers Project that launched last year.

Miedziak ( MAY’-jak) will premiere “Seereise,” or “Sea Journey” in German, at the MYS concert at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on March 8. The performance will be part of MYS’ 2019-20 season.

Miedziak describes the piece as cinematic, which is fitting: One of her goals post-graduation (she attends early college classes at Central Oregon Community College through the Baker Early College program) is to become a film composer.

“I couldn’t sleep one night, and I was just laying in bed just thinking, and this melody comes to me in the middle of the night,” Miedziak said. “Again, it just happens spontaneously, randomly. And actually to rewind a little bit — recently I’ve been doing a lot of college applications and I’ve been researching music schools. And the thought that I’m gonna be starting a new chapter in my life and moving away from home — while exciting, it’s also kind of daunting, like I’m gonna start a new adventure.”

From ‘Aladdin’ to classical piano

Miedziak will be the only composer representing Bend and Central Oregon in The Authentic Voice this year; the other two composers hail from the Portland area. Born and raised in Bend, Miedziak grew up surrounded by music. Her mother, Tanja Majack (Miedziak spells her name the traditional Polish way), played the violin for 14 years and would constantly have music on in the house.

“I always put her in all of the summer camps to let her try everything — my philosophy is to let kids try everything and see what they like,” Majack said. “She really gravitated towards musical theater and singing camps — that was her favorite.”

Miedziak remembers singing along to Disney and Barbie movies as a kid. Her favorite is “Aladdin,” and she starred as Jasmine in a BEAT Children’s Theatre production of the story when she was in seventh grade.

She received her first keyboard when she was 7. Eventually, her parents bought her a full piano — the same piano that used to be in McMenamin’s Old St. Francis School when it was a school in the late 1800s, Majack said.

Even before that, Miedziak would make up songs and sing them around the house. Her compositional creativity bloomed after she got the keyboard, and her mother remembers sitting for impromptu living-room concerts of her latest compositions.

“I remember her first song that she ever did for us when she was 7,” Majack said. “It was a thunderstorm, so she did the little plinking of the water, raindrops. And then the storm came and she started doing chords down on the bottom. She created this whole storm piece. We were like, ‘Wow, that’s pretty awesome.’”

In 2012, Miedziak started piano lessons with local composer and piano teacher Larry Rauch, with whom she still studies.

“He helped me get into the Young Composers Project, so without him, I don’t know if I’d be doing what I’m doing, so I’m super grateful for him,” Miedziak said.

Getting commissioned

In 2016 Miedziak entered one of her compositions into the Oregon Music Teachers Association’s annual celebration for the first time and won one of the top prizes in the competition portion. She’s continued to submit to OMTA and its parent organization, Music Teachers National Association , or MTNA.

Through these celebrations, Miedziak met Young Composers Project founder Jeff Payne, who invited her to join the program. (Fear No Music and the Young Composers Project have provided opportunities for young composers and musicians in grades 6 through 12 since 1992.) She did last year, and composed her piece “For Little Grace,” for piano, vibraphone, cello, violin and alto saxophone.

It was her first time writing for other instruments besides the piano, and it led to the Metropolitan Youth Symphony commissioning Miedziak’s first orchestral composition. In November, the piece also won first place in MTNA’s Oregon Senior Composition competition.

“One piece led into the next,” Miedziak said. “I initially wrote a piano piece and that led to YCP, and then YCP led me to the orchestral piece.”

Instead of five instruments, Miedziak wrote for close to 90 players in the youth symphony, including strings, woodwinds and French horn — a key instrument in the piece.

Creative process

While she translates what’s in her head to the piano, the piece will have no piano in its finished form. However, because she hears the melodies in her head before writing them — and can hear each instrument, too — writing for new instruments didn’t present too much of a challenge.

“It’s hard to explain, but I hear the strings doing their thing,” Miedziak said. “I hear the chord and then I hear, for example, the French horns playing a melody while the strings are doing a certain chord or a certain progression, and then I hear the woodwinds supporting the melody in the background. I hear it in my head, and I don’t really know where it comes from, again. I think my inspiration just comes from everywhere.”

The Authentic Voice composers get to submit two drafts of their piece to MYS for rehearsals and feedback before turning in the final sheet music. Miedziak was commissioned in May and has already submitted her final draft following the two feedback sessions.

“I just wanted a really cinematic, dramatic, almost John Williams-sounding main theme that sounded inspirational,” Miedziak said. “I feel like my vision of that really translated through, and I was very happy about that. And then there was some leveling things that were kind of not the best — I needed to change some dynamics. Some people said, ‘This is impossible doing this certain thing on my instrument; can you make it simpler?’ Like for example, I gave the trombones some melodies that were too quick, and it’s hard for them to play notes quickly.”

MYS Music Director Rául Gómez said he was impressed by Miedziak’s punctuality with deadlines — each of her drafts came in “way before deadline,” he said — but more significantly, her ability to create a “cinematic piece.”

“She is able to really paint a picture very effectively of what her title says, a sea voyage,” Gómez said. “The colors that she uses in the orchestration of the piece are very effective also. The dramatic moments that she creates — she’s a very, very gifted young composer.”

Not only is “Seereise” student-composed and student-performed, it will be student-conducted by Sam Ross, assistant conductor and group manager for MYS’ Symphony Orchestra.

“The work itself is almost like a film score; you can feel the waves of the ocean, and the heroic episodes harboring a sense of journey and discovery,” Ross said via email. “… Grace herself is a very enthusiastic and obviously talented person. She’s very personable, especially open to questions and suggestions from the players and myself, which is a very important process that takes place when working on a world premiere, and a very honorable trait to have.”

Looking to the future

Miedziak, who cites film composers such as Williams, James Newton Howard (“The Dark Knight”) and Bobby Krlic (“Midsommar”) among her influences, has multiple outlets for her creativity. She has released multiple LAIK singles through Spotify and YouTube — moody piano compositions that draw on her classical influences as well as indie rock and singer-songwriter fare such as Fiona Apple, Tori Amos and Sleeping at Last.

She also volunteers as a music therapist at local hospice Partners in Care and with a private client at a local retirement community, singing and performing songs from the 1940s and ‘50s on piano.

“It really helps them manage pain, and it provides a peaceful environment because hospice can get kind of sad,” she said. “… I’ve had some wonderful experiences there. Music, it’s just so healing for some people. I remember there was this one woman, she loved the song ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ and so I performed it for her and then she started crying tears of joy, just saying, ‘I love that song, it reminds me of my husband and my childhood home.’”

Miedziak hopes to continue doing this, but film composing is her primary goal. She said she’s looking at schools in the Los Angeles area as well as Oregon.

“It was my dream to compose for orchestra, and it was like my dream came true,” she said. “And I feel like it’s really helping me down my path of pursuing my dream job of being a composer, and it’s helped me discover my passion even more. It’s helped me be like, ‘Wow, this is really what I want to do.’”