On a typical night, Nicholas Brown '10 gets about three to five hours of sleep. "Some people say I run the music department. I don't really, but I do everything to support it," he says.Brown is a member of and manager for the Brandeis Chorus and Chamber Choir, plays french horn in the Brandeis-Wellesley Orchestra, is a founding member and director of both the Free Play Theater Cooperative and the Irving Fine Society and is a sometime stage manager for the Brandeis Theater Company. All of which is not to mention his work with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the 215th Army Band.

A Music History major, Brown has his sights on conducting rather than performance or composition.

"The goal is to be a conductor, for sure, and hopefully be the conductor of a major orchestra, one day. As an undergrad you can't really do a major in conducting, so what I'm trying to do is kind of get a broad education and understanding of all the things you need to know," he says.

In addition to his classes at Brandeis, Brown also studies conducting at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge. "A lot of what I'm doing here is learning the more theoretical sides to analyzing music," he says. "I'm focusing on knowledge and learning repertoire. But that's the big dream goal, is to be a conductor. It's not one of those things that there's a clear path as to what you need to do to make it. There's a lot of luck and networking that's involved."

Brown practices his conducting skills with the Irving Fine Society, a small vocal and instrumental ensemble that he convened last year to play 20th century and modern classical music, "in honor of Irving Fine, [founder of the School of Creative Arts and the music department at Brandeis]," Brown says.

"The 20th century [in music] is what I want to know most about," he says. Brown, whose favorite composers are Tchaikovsky, Irving Fine and Leonard Bernstein, feels that there's a lack of knowledge about 20th century music, even in the music community.

"Musicians will know about the 20th century but even then there are musicians who don't know who Irving Fine was and here, to be a Brandeis person and not know Irving Fine-had he not died so young, he'd have the star power of maybe not Bernstein, but Copland at least. He was friends with Leonard Bernstein and Copland, and he brought them to teach here. He was a very important American composer. At least, I'm obsessed with him; I'm his little fan club." He continued, "Part of the Irving Fine Society has been an exploration for me and the people in the ensemble of learning this music, that we didn't know existed, that's absolutely amazing. It's new and fresh and people need to know about it, and so a big part of what we're dong is trying to expose people to the music of new composers."

Brown's fan club-cum-ensemble has plans to perform at a music department memorial concert for the Brandeis composer, as well as in a concert during the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts, but those aren't the only plans Brown has up his sleeve.

"It's ridiculous, but I even have more ideas of things that I want to start here, like a chamber orchestra and a brass quintet and things like that but really, this semester has really sucked for my own sleep and rest time," he says. As a member of the Army Band, Brown has to keep up with his military duties as well as his musical endeavors. "I finished school in the spring and went to basic training for the Army all summer and then came right back, so I haven't had any sort of break."

Although Brown has a seemingly endless list of musical activities he wants to pursue, he wasn't always so keen on music performance. "It's always been part of a struggle, because at one point I might have wanted to do theater. A lot of high school I wanted to be in the military," he says. "In middle school my mom would literally have to chase me around the house to get me to go to orchestra rehearsal. I give her a lot of the credit for keeping me in music.

It's very much a progression over high school that, the more I was doing, the more I realized that music is my passion. Now I couldn't imagine living without singing or playing an instrument. Music is all that I do, and I'm so overloaded and overwhelmed with music it's ridiculous, but it's what I love doing so that's why I do it."

With all his experience in different areas of music performance, Brown is uncertain about the future. "It's insane, and it's just such a bizarre profession that there's no set path. There are grad programs in conducting obviously, but some people just go out and audition for major orchestras, and they get the job. But a lot of it is getting assistantships with major conductors and studying with a lot of people and meeting a lot of people and asking to conduct and that sort of thing."

"Right now I'm at a loss. But I think I'm happy that I was able to start so young because most times people don't start conducting until college or later. And I think it's maybe giving me a little bit of a leg up, but I'm not sure. We have yet to see if there will be any results.