June 13, 2002

Boise State Administrator Wins International Music Competition

It lasts just under four minutes, and it only took about a week to write. She hasn’t even heard it played, yet her composition beat out 57 other entrants from around the world to win the 2002 Merle J. Isaac Composition Contest.

Linda Yordy, adjunct business instructor and assistant director of Boise State University’s Center for Management Development, entered the competition—her first—on a whim. She never expected to win. But on May 20, a panel of five judges selected her “Meditation for Strings” as the latest winner in the contest’s 43-year history.

“I was shocked. It was the first piece I had ever written for string orchestra,” said Yordy, who wrote the piece in March for her graduate-level composition class at Boise State.

The contest, sponsored by the American String Teachers Association with National School Orchestra Association, invited composers to submit original, unpublished compositions written for elementary, middle and high school orchestras.

James Richards, contest chair and conductor of the St. Louis Chamber Orchestra, said Yordy’s slow and lyrical piece, performed for the judges by St. Louis’ Kirkwood High School Orchestra, was chosen for its artistic quality and technical suitability for school orchestras.

For her achievement, Yordy receives $1,500, national publicity and publication of her manuscript.

Yordy earned her bachelor’s of music in theory/composition from Boise State in 1986. Then, she says, she took 15 years off from composing to pursue a practical career. She earned her MBA and has worked as an administrator at Boise State for the past 12 years.

Music, however, remains her passion. Yordy plays Baroque flute in Camerata, a flute and guitar duo with Boise State music professor Joe Baldassarre. And when she completes her flute pedagogy master’s next spring, Yordy intends to pursue a career in film scoring.