Associate Conductor Jennifer Sacher Wiley directs the SU Masterworks Orchestra and Chorus during the world premiere of Rain, River, Sea, written by Associate Professor of Music Patrick Long.

For Jennifer Sacher Wiley, associate professor of music and director of the Susquehanna University Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall performance marked a return to her roots. “I grew up right outside New York, so it was kind of like a homecoming for me,” she says.

The performance also chronicled just how far Susquehanna’s music program has come over the past 10 years. Before Wiley joined the university in 1997, Susquehanna had no orchestra. String students had to travel to Lewisburg to play with Bucknell’s orchestra.

On March 7, Wiley found herself returning home to New York with the orchestra she’d developed at Susquehanna. “I enjoyed many years of investing in this school, falling in love with this place, teaching students who are generous and talented. There we all were, going together to New York where I grew up. It was thrilling,” she says.

It is a concert she says her students will not soon forget. “For us, this was like a pilgrimage. From a musician’s perspective, Carnegie Hall is like the Great Wall of China, Machu Picchu or the Notre Dame cathedral. It’s a sacred place where great performances of the past have been held.”

But for Wiley, the most exciting aspect of the concert was not the location but the music itself. Conducting the world premiere of Patrick Long’s original composition Rain, River, Sea was one of the highlights of her career. “I have to say this is one of the most meaningful pieces that I’ve ever worked on,” she says. “It’s simultaneously scholarly and carefree. It engages us fully as musicians while also satisfying the spirit. So, in this revered concert hall, I helped bring to life a significant new work that may someday take its place among other great works for chorus and orchestra. It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

That is, unless you consider that the performance kicked off Susquehanna’s sesquicentennial celebration. In Wiley’s eyes, the performance was a fitting way to begin the celebration because it exemplified Susquehanna’s youthful spirit. “When the university decided to invest in the Carnegie Hall performance, that was the institution saying, ‘Let’s invest in what makes this school fresh and beautiful,’ ” she says.

“Susquehanna is a place where naïveté, innocence and wonder are embraced, and I think music is a way to celebrate youth at its best,” she says. “When you listen to a live performance, you don’t know what the outcome will be because the music evolves through time. You can’t hold it in your hand and examine it. It is these most abstract art forms that help us become childlike, open to possibility.” To Wiley, the Carnegie Hall experience was a clear affirmation that Susquehanna is – in its essence – youthful, even after 150 years.