Three students from J. Donald Feagin Assistant Professor of Music Alican Çamcı’s film scoring workshop worked together to create the music for Jenks Public Schools Planetarium’s “Tulsa Takes Flight” show this past fall. Created in conjunction with the Tulsa Historical Society and the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, the show takes viewers through Tulsa’s contributions to the Aerospace industry, in the past, present, and the future.
“The director of the planetarium at Jenks Public Schools, Dan Zielinski, contacted me about a collaboration between our film scoring students and the Jenks high school students, for their ‘Tulsa Takes Flight’ project,” explained Çamcı . “They provided us with information about the different chapters that comprised the show, which were drawn from various moments of Tulsa’s aeronautic history.”

Sarah Woosley (who completed her music education degree in December), Caedon Davis (an English and creative writing senior), and Charlie Edwards (a film studies junior) split the show’s tracks among themselves, with each student covering a different time period. “We wanted to encapsulate different styles of music that were popular during that decade,” said Edwards. “Sarah, who was in charge of doing the ’40s, implemented jazz elements. Caedon, who did the 1800s and early 1900s, used ragtime for his eras.”
Meanwhile, Edwards oversaw scoring the 1990s, early 2000s, and the outro, focusing primarily on space travel, like the ongoing Artemis missions. “I included drums, piano, and guitar trying to get more contemporary rock elements. When I moved into the Artemis missions, I focused more on getting synthesizer and space sounds to give it a very atmospheric feeling,” he said.
Incorporating such different musical styles is no easy feat, but the process allowed the students to have an open space for getting creative. “It was really free range, bouncing stuff off of each other to make something. It opened up a creative space for us to get better, get more music under our fingers, and create some cool sounds,” Edwards said.
Together the three had to work to match the different tracks and ensure the jumps between decades were not too dramatic. “There’s a very technical element to this. If the song ends in B flat major, the next one should start in a related key so that each track rolls into the next one,” he explained.
“Working on this project captured a crucial aspect of collaboration in creative contexts: It often involves venturing into unfamiliar territory that requires discovering new ways to use one’s creative tools,” said Çamcı. “While composing these cues, Caedon, Charlie, and Sarah weren’t entirely sure what to expect – nor was I – but their artistic intuition and the techniques they had developed in class enabled them to create a score that is both coherent and truly collaborative.”
The three composers and were invited to the show’s debut in October. “It was really bizarre, honestly, seeing something that we worked on for so long outside of the context of the film scoring lab,” reminisced Edwards. “I’ve composed for student films before, but I’d never scored for a planetarium before. It’s a completely different style.”