Erica Ball was just 3 years old when she begged her parents to let her play the piano. She doesn’t remember exactly what sparked her interest, but Ball says her fluency grew quickly as she progressed from playing on a tiny keyboard to a baby grand by middle school. Ball, now a fourth-year graduate student in composition in the Department of Music in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, also plays the violin and, through the beginning of high school, was a serious dancer.

“I learned to read music probably a few months before I learned to read words,” Ball says. “I’ve always loved music and as a kid, I always loved moving to music. My mom likes to say she would put on a CD and she could clean the whole house because I would stay in the room where the music was and bounce up and down to it.”

Ball was just 5 when she penned her first composition—a little song called “Mommy Beat the Bookcase” about how her mother triumphed in building a piece of IKEA furniture. She didn’t write her own work again until high school, when she attended a summer session at The Walden School Young Musicians Program.

As an undergraduate at Bard College, Ball wrote for several instrumentations, including a mixed chamber piece for two flutes, a bass clarinet, two percussionists, a violin and cello, and for the Da Capo Chamber Players, which is flute, violin, cello, clarinet, and piano. Ball has also written two orchestral pieces and a viola concerto, and is working on an orchestral piece for her dissertation.

Ball’s work has been inspired by nature, and she makes sure she stays alert to characteristics of noises in everyday life that may find their way into her music, including her tea bag that makes a glissandi effect when raised in and out of a cup to a squeaky piano lid.

“I’m not going to have a piano player make the piano lid squeak when they play, but just the idea of being fascinated by sounds, I think that’s what excites me the most about music,” she says.

No matter the composition, Ball scores everything by hand.

“There’s something that’s really dangerous about the copy-and-paste keys on the computer, whereas when you have to write out the same thing over and over again by hand, you really start to question what you’re doing and you evaluate it in a different way,” Ball says. “I have, in the past, gotten reactions from players where they treat the music differently because it’s handwritten. There’s something more real in that yes, someone wrote this, someone spent time considering every little line, every little note.”