The good weather brought a good time for the students and community members who came out to listen to live music at the Terpstock Music Festival on April 13 at the Nyumburu Amphitheater.
Terpstock is a student run music festival put together by Student Entertainment Events [SEE]. This year was SEE’s fifth annual Terpstock and the artists included Ace Enders, Kinetics & One Love, A Great Big Pile of Leaves and the local artists Teen Suicide and Joe Martin Trio.
Co- headliner, Ace Enders plays for the pop-punk genre and once went on tour with the All-American Rejects. His album, In Currents, recorded with his old band, The Early November, reached number 43 on the Billboard 200 which is a ranking of the highest-selling albums in the U.S., according to SEE. The other co-headliner of the concert was Kinetics & One Love who is a hip-hop duo from New York that have written music for artists like Eminem, B.o.B., Nicki Minaj and Sean Kingston.
Andi Hubbell is the Musical Arts Director of SEE and said that although in the past the event featured better-known artists like Shwayze, the artists this year have made measurable success in their own genres.
As Musical Arts Director, Hubbell said it is her job to see what kind of artists students would be interesting in seeing, she does this through surveys and her own independent research. After the board of directors approves the artist, the deal is made with the artist’s agent to bring them to Maryland.
April and May are popular times for outdoor concerts so Hubbell knew she had to start looking early. She started looking for artists in October and said at this year’s Terpstock the relaxed music and diverse lineup would make students go add the artists on Spotify when they went home.
Hubbell expected to see several hundred students at the event throughout the course of the day. In the past, directors estimated between 500 and 1000 people to have come to Terpstock. Students and community members alike passed through the concert since the concert was free everyone was allowed to come and go as they pleased. Due to the fact that people were coming and going it was hard to detect just how many were there, but the Facebook event said 441 students were attending.
“I thought it was really great, as far as on-campus shows go. The weather was perfect and the sound setup was surprisingly good for an outdoor venue,” sophomore journalism major Matt Schnabel said. “ I was really excited to see A Great Big Pile of Leaves and they really killed it live.”
The bands requested the audience to stand up and move along with them but the audience was not very responsive, according to sophomore community health major Nisa Hussain. Hussain said people were just happy sitting and enjoying the beautiful weather.
“It was such a breezy, pleasant Sunday and it was a refreshing different activity to attend on campus,” Hussain said.