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Dr. Stella Sung on composing, technology and UCF Create's precollege plans
Summary
On Artfully Orange, UCF Create director Dr. Stella Sung discussed her trajectory from piano student to composer, her long-term use of digital projection and new experiments with AR/VR and AI, and plans to grow UCF Create's precollege summer intensives into a larger outreach division.
Vicky Landon, administrator for Orange County’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, introduced Dr. Stella Sung on Artfully Orange and asked the composer about her early musical influences, work at UCF Create and experiments with digital technology in performance.
Dr. Stella Sung, composer and director of UCF Create, said she began piano lessons at about age 8 and attended what was then the National Music Camp (now Interlochen Arts Summer Camp) at age 12, an experience she described as decisive: “I knew at that time that doing music was what I wanted to do.” She recounted earning a bachelor’s degree in piano performance at the University of Michigan, a master’s in composition at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and doctoral piano work at the University of Texas at Austin.
Asked about technology's role in contemporary composition, Sung traced a through line from early use of slide projectors to large-scale digital projections, AR and VR. She cited a 2003 commission with the Orlando Philharmonic that incorporated Hubble imagery into a piece called Constellations and said audiences now often expect more experiential presentations. “I have experimented with, both, AR, augmented reality, as well as VR,” Sung said, adding that she is developing a project she calls “composer versus AI” to test what artificial intelligence can and cannot do in the arts. “My feeling is that, as a composer, I hope that it never get replaced by AI,” she said, while acknowledging that “the machine has a place in our lives.”
Sung described UCF Create as part of the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities and emphasized the program’s community partnerships with organizations such as TechSassy Girls and the Boys & Girls Club. She said Create now focuses more on high school students through concentrated two‑week summer precollege animation intensives held in June and July that teach 2D and 3D animation alongside drawing and faculty mentoring.
Looking ahead, Sung said she would like to grow Create into a formal precollege division—analogous to the Juilliard School’s precollege program—to help students prepare for college-level arts study. On recent creative collaborations, she said she was commissioned to compose Secret River (she corrected herself during the interview, saying she was “commissioned in 2023, for 2022, sorry”) with a libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning librettist Mark Campbell; the work premiered with the Orlando Philharmonic and was staged recently on-site at Mead Garden as part of Opera Orlando’s tenth anniversary. Sung described Secret River as family-focused and suitable for introducing children to opera.
On listening to film scores, Sung said composers often hear orchestration and how music supports character and action, but the most effective scores are those that serve the drama without calling attention to themselves.
The program closed with Landon thanking Sung for the conversation and Sung thanking Landon and Orange County for supporting arts programming.
