Mike Wolanin | The Republic The band The Electric Symphony performs during the Bartholomew County Historical Society’s inaugural Chuck Taylor Day event in Columbus, Ind., Saturday, June 7, 2025.
Editor’s note:
Due to a Republic error, the date for the Frost Fest concert was incorrect in this story. The correct date is Saturday, Jan. 17 from 6:30 to 10 p.m.
How can music help the community?
That’s what Columbus Signature Academy New Tech students Landon Nowak and Taven Newby sought out to learn for their senior project. In their research to find the answer, they decided to put on Frost Fest, a music festival featuring local talent, and invite the whole community out to this free concert.
“It’s going to be a great night,” Nowak said.
Frost Fest will take place from 6:30 to 10 p.m. Saturday at Columbus East High School’s auditorium.
The concert will feature Dane Darlage, Kae Grube and Hi Rise, in addition to Electric Symphony, which Nowak, a graduating junior, and Newby, a senior, are the keyboardist and guitarist of respectively. The band also features vocalist Bella Lutz, drummer Elijah Brown and bassist Henry Barr, all of whom are juniors.
Since their start about three years ago, Electric Symphony has gone on to play at several local events including Chuck Taylor Day and HutchFest. Soon, they’ll be able to add Frost Fest to that resume.
A live concert as part of a fair project for CSA Pathways kick started their love of playing in front of a crowd, but it was a music festival they performed at called the Crump Bump, another senior project for seniors interested in music, that inspired Nowak and Newby to produce a music festival for their own senior project.
“It was honestly the highlight of my freshman year and once it was time for us to start picking ours, that was kind of what we fell to was trying to do something like that and as the Crump didn’t work out as a venue, we still wanted to keep the spirit of a music festival for free, for the people,” Nowak said. “And just how the schedule worked out, East was the best venue. We’ve played there once now and it’s a phenomenal place to play.”
Though the Crump Theatre didn’t work out as a venue, Nowak said Jess Schnepp, the recently retired project manager of the Crump, has acted as their official mentor, helping them with the marketing and the logistics of this concert.
“We consider this a little bit more of our work and she’s kind of been like our work mom helping us through navigating the whole scene in the area,” Nowak said. “We’ve been working closely with her, volunteering at the Crump since our freshman year.”
Members of the Hi Rise band, who Nowak said they are very close with, have also been great mentors in putting the concert together. In fact, Nowak said they found out that the band’s guitarist and bassist put together something similar for their own senior project years ago. Darlage and Grube are also musicians who Electric Symphony has played alongside with before at open mic nights in the area, he said.
“They’re both phenomenal musicians and great people and we’ve just been very close with them for a while now,” Nowak said. “So whenever we’re trying to figure out how to fill that time, as our senior project, it felt important to focus on people that had been around us a lot and people who we knew cared for it and cared for the area’s music scene, and those are those people.”
The students have had a lot of freedom for what their senior project could focus on, as long as it helps the community in some fashion, Nowak said. Their findings, what did or didn’t work and how their project helped the community will then be presented at the end of the semester.
In their research of how music can help a community, Nowak said they found how live music can help others with mental illness, such as music being a form of therapy. They also found that music acts as a really good connector to people who aren’t typically around it, something Nowak said they have noticed in their personal lives.
“And part of the reason we’re mixing a lot of genres with this, we have more folk, Hi Rise, the other larger band on the night, is a bit more punk and then we’re a bit more classic rock,” Nowak said. “And so the idea is that all those forms of music can bring those communities together and make them all stronger.”
Nowak said the band will be performing some new music at the concert. He said it’d be great for Frost Fest to continue annually, but the idea of Frost Fest, that it’s not as daunting as it looks to put on an event like this if you work with the right people and you understand aspects like reaching out to people, is what he wants to continue.
“… even if it’s not under the same name, having the idea that it is possible for people our age to plan these events and get more into the booking side of things or even get more into the performance side, I think that’s the bigger goal even if it’s not Frost Fest,” Nowak said.
