Jack Szczuka

​Jack Szczuka (born 2001) is a composer who is currently a 2nd-year bachelor’s student at Indiana University-Bloomington at the Jacobs School of Music. Outside of music, he is studying Central Eurasian Studies at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global/Int’l Studies, with a language track in Uzbek. He is also a participant in the Russian Flagship Program at Indiana University. Szczuka participated in the 2019 High School Composition Intensive at Boston Conservatory. He was the 1st place winner of the Cape Fear New Music Festival’s inaugural High School Composition Competition, hosted by Methodist University. His arrangement of the Kazakh folk song “Közimning Qarasy'' was presented at the 175th Anniversary of Abay Qunanbaiuly Event jointly hosted by Indiana University’s Wells Library and Nazarbayev University in Nursultan, Kazakhstan. Szczuka’s current projects include a series of vocal works setting the text of the ancient Central Asian epic Alpomish in Uzbek and a quintet that experiments with the spaced-repetition theory of memorization. His first piece in the vocal series about Alpomish, titled Birga-Birga Boramiz, is the NOTUS Composition Competition 1st place winner, and will be premiered by the NOTUS Choral Ensemble at IU in April 2022. Outside of composition, Szczuka participates in ensembles in Bloomington, such as University Chorale, Slavic Choir, and the Silk Road Ensemble.