Shepherd University students (L-R): Charity Meyer on harp, Emily Ellmore on saxophone, Levi Parker on trumpet and Gabby Tedeschi on clarinet perform together as Unstrung, in front of McMurran Hall on Saturday. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — After enrolling in a musical entrepreneurship class at the beginning of this semester at Shepherd University, four friends found themselves growing excited about their final project — creating a business plan for a hypothetical musical group. As they worked together toward this final goal, they realized that they wanted to take it a step further than their teacher, Interim Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of Jazz Studies Kurtis Adams, had required.

The students decided to actually create the musical group that their business plan was developed for, between themselves. They then decided to end the semester with a performance or two, as the new quartet, Unstrung. On Nov. 12, Unstrung performed together during Shepherd’s Small Ensembles Recital in the Frank Center. They then performed a full-length concert this past Saturday, on McMurran Hall’s lawn.

“In the class on entrepreneurship, we talked about how, with a performance degree, getting gigs is really hard when you’re right out of college. Dr. Adams, which was the professor for the class, talked about how he came together with other musicians and made groups with them and recorded with them and they made money off of coming together, after finding that they couldn’t get gigs on their own,” said instrumental performance major Gabby Tedeschi, whose concentration is in clarinet. “That’s was a big driving force behind our decision to form our own group.”

Although the quartet has no set plans for future performances, they hope to perform together again after graduation, at venues around the D.C. metropolitan area.

“We’re all seniors in college right now and we’re all finishing up our performance degrees right now, so we probably will take a break from performing together next semester,” Tedeschi said, mentioning two of the quartet’s members will be performing their senior recitals in the spring semester. “But we definitely want to someday meet up again and perform together!”

Unstrung’s saxophonist, Emily Ellmore, is double majoring in music performance and composition. She was particularly instrumental to the group’s success, as she used her composition skills to arrange quartets for trumpet, clarinet, harp and saxophone out of two works by Joseph Haydn and Charles Ives, which were originally written for string quartets.

“We wanted to specifically do string quartet music, because of our name, ‘Unstrung!'” Ellmore said, as the group chuckled in response.

While one of the instruments in the quartet does technically have strings, instrumental performance major Charity Meyer said her harp is not strung in the same way as the typical stringed instrument.

“The harp’s way of being strung is so entirely different from the way that violin or cello are strung,” Meyer said. “That definitely made it a bit of a challenge for Emily!”

As the quartet smiled with joy at the completion of their concert, they expressed their delight in having been able to turn their final project into a reality.

“Although this was for a class, it felt like we were doing this because we wanted to, more than anything else,” said instrumental performance major Levi Parker, whose concentration is in trumpet. “There was a lot of work that went into this, outside of the regular class expectations. But it was all worth it, to be able to do this together!”