When it comes to quantifying Aiden Levendofsky’s musical talents, particularly when he’s sitting at a piano, Rock Creek Choir and Musical Theater Director Janie Brokenicky doesn’t need an elaborate response.
 
Instead, she’s strikes a simple chord.
 
“In our world, he’s what we call a prodigy,” Brokenicky said.
 
A junior at Rock Creek, Levendofsky indeed has a beautiful mind when it comes to the piano. Whether it’s playing or composing, Levendofsky fully embodies the prodigy label that Brokenicky has bestowed upon him.
 
“He’s the definition of a musician,” Brokenicky said. “He’s not an instrumentalist. He’s not a vocalist. He’s not a composer. He’s a musician. He’s all-encompassing in his abilities. The emotion that comes out when he’s making music is a god-given ability. It really is.”
 
Levendofsky is this week’s CapFed® TrueBlue® Student of the Week.
 

 
A gravitation toward music began at an early age for Levendofsky, perhaps coming by it naturally as the son of a former member of the Kansas State marching band as well as band teacher, Scott Levendofsky, who now teaches English at Wamego High School.
 
In particular, Levendofsky was drawn to the piano.
 
“I like the piano specifically because of how versatile it is and how many applications it has,” Levendofsky said. “It’s just a really great instrument. You can create the sound of an entire orchestra with just your 10 fingers. It’s extremely versatile and it can pretty much evoke any emotion you can get out of music.”
 
As a young boy, he would often mess around on the piano in the Levendofsky household, “seeing what I could come up with.” He also had a plastic keyboard in his room on which he began learning how to play songs by ear as well as coming up with his own melodies.
 
As soon as he began to show not only an affinity, but talent for the instrument, his parents, Scott and Stacie, bought him an acoustic piano with the full complement of 88 keys and enrolled him in lessons at Glenn’s Music in Manhattan where they lived.
 
When he reached sixth grade, Levendofsky began taking private lessons from Sibylle Kuder at the Elfenbein Klaviermusik Studio in Manhattan and has been under her tutelage ever since.
 
From there, Levendofsky has taken off.
 
“Music has always been a big part of my life,” he said. “I’ve been involved in whatever musical activities were available at school.”
 
At Rock Creek, Levendofsky plays snare drum in the marching band and drums in the pep band. In concert band, he’s a percussionist as well, playing instruments such as the marimba and xylophone as well as filling in wherever needed.
 
He’s accomplished enough that he’s been selected to play in the Class 4-1A All-State Band, which will perform Feb. 24 at Century II Concert Hall in Wichita as part of the Kansas Music Educators Association’s annual in-service workshop.
 
Levendofsky’s duties won’t that day won’t just be limited to that performance.
 
He’s also composed an original arrangement of Home of the Range for the Flint Hills Children’s Choir, which will perform at the conference. That choir is also directed by Brokenicky.
 
Levendofsky’s twin sister, Paige, will also perform as a member of the KMEA All-State Choir. Paige also has ties with Brokenicky, having taken singing lessons from her for several years.
 

 
Aiden also sings bass in the Rock Creek choir and often plays piano accompaniment for the choir. In addition, he has accompanied several Rock Creek solos and ensembles at the state music festival.
 
“I like it because it’s a way of helping others,” Levendofsky said. “As a pianist, I do a lot of collaborative piano, accompanying soloists or choirs and that’s really good practice and experience for me.”
 
Brokenicky said that just speaks to Levendofsky’s nature.
 
“He’s very giving of his time,” she said. “If a student wants to go practice their solo, he’ll sit down and play it for them. He’s my bass section leader and I’ll send the guys off and say, ‘Aiden go teach them this. And it’s ‘Sure, no problem.’ He doesn’t hoard his abilities for himself. He is giving of his abilities and that’s what’s going to make him successful.”
 
In addition to his work with the choir, Levendofsky has also accompanied Rock Creek’s musicals each of his three years in high school. His freshman year, it was Mary Poppins. His sophomore year, it was Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
 
This year, he’s already accompanied Seussical in the fall and just recent finished performing the second one of the year, 1940s Radio Hour.
 
All four musicals had drastically different scores, yet Levendofsky handled them with relative ease. 
 
“They were all very different,” Levendofsky said. “Into the Woods was very complex. Suessical was your stereotypical show tunes. 1940s Radio Hour, it emulated the environment of what Radio City Music Hall was like back then. It was set up like a live performance so all the musicians were on stage. It was very vintage.”
 
His ability to adapt to whatever was put in front of him impressed Brokenicky. Especially through unintended hardships.
 
“The first time I worked with him as a freshman, and he played the Mary Poppins score flawlessly as a 14-year-old,” she said. “And I just couldn’t believe the level of ability.
 
“Fast-forward to his sophomore year and he’s playing the score for Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Sondheim is hard. One of the nights at the show, his piano lamp went out. He kept playing the score from memory for like three minutes while I quickly tried to get him a new light. His ability is uncanny, it really is.
 
“(1940s radio hour) for basically 2 hours, he was improv-ing. It was a new challenge, and he’d done some jazz before so it wasn’t that he hadn’t done it. But to do it with singers and on that scale with things changing every night because there’s no director, He was the conductor on stage for that orchestra. He ate it up. He was flawless.”
 

 
That he was able to master a variety of musical styles should come as no surprise. When asked if there’s one genre that he’s drawn to more than others, Levendofsky can’t pinpoint one. And nor does he particularly want to.
 
“I listen to all types of music,” he said. “I play a lot of classical because that’s just what’s pretty common for piano students to play, and I love classical. But I love jazz, bluegrass, musical theater. For me, it’s not really about the genre. It’s about the quality of any individual song.
 
“I think with music I’ve always been jumping from one interest to another. I would be stagnant if I was only doing classical or only doing jazz. Each type of music has so much to offer and what they have to offer is unique. I’ll always be looking to different types of music to see what kind of further exploration I can do.”
 
Even going back to his early experiences on the family piano and plastic keyboard, Levendofsky has been drawn to more than just the performance side of music. His initial dabblings in coming up with his own tunes has blossomed over the years and led to his desire to compose musical pieces for the piano as well.
 
“As long as I’ve been playing piano, I’ve tried to come up with little tunes I could play,” he said. “From fourth grade to the start of high school I would sketch down all these musical ideas that I had. It got to the point where I had just enough and thrown away enough drafts to start finishing some works and putting them out on the internet.”
 
At the end of his freshman year at Rock Creek, Levendofsky submitted a composition for an annual contest held by the National Association for Musical Education (NAfME). Open to composers from kindergarten through the collegiate level, the prompt was to write a vocal solo with a piano accompaniment.
 
“I felt pretty comfortable because I could write a pretty good piano part,” he said. “And with my sister a singer, I’m pretty experienced with vocal stuff.”
 
Inspired by the escalating war in Ukraine, he composed a piece called “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which is a poem written by Sara Teasdale during World War I that is a reflection on what happens if the war kept going on and totally destroyed everything.
 
“It’s kind of dark, but it’s kind of cathartic because it ends with a description of nature being perfect because there’s no war anymore because everything’s been destroyed,” Levendofsky said. “I thought it was pretty poignant and I could work with so I went from there.”
 
He submitted a recording with Brokenicky accompanying him with her vocals. And to his surprise, he was named the National High School winner for 2022.
 
“It was a huge honor,” Levendofsky said. “I submitted it mostly to see what would happen and for the comments because every submission gets comments from the composer judges. That was one of my first times doing something like that so I didn’t expect to win on the national level.”
 
His piece was performed by professional musicians at a recital in National Harbor, Md., that year. He also performed it with Brokenicky at the KMEA.
 
“I had to practice,” Brokenicky said. “That thing was just advanced. It was not ridiculous in terms of it didn’t make sense. It was just advanced for what a student of his age can do.”
 
The recognition has opened many doors for Levendofsky’s composing talents.
 
In addition to writing an original piece for Brokenicky’s Flint Hills Children’s Choir, he’s been commissioned by Kansas State to compose for its choir as well. He’s creating multiple pieces for his college portfolio and his goal is to attend Juilliard Conservatory in New York City.
 
“That’s always been my dream as soon as I knew it existed,” Levendofsky said. “It just felt very right, like a serendipitous fit for me. It’s across the street from the Met, down the street from Carnegie Hall. It’s the best possible place to go if you want to be exposed to as much musical stuff as possible. Going to a conservatory there’s never going to be a shortage of opportunities at the college.”
 
Levendofsky said he draws inspiration from a number of influences, naming David Bruce, Chris Thile and Jacob Collier among his favorites. He’s even collaborated online with Bruce.
 
And just as he has a hard time picking a favorite music genre or influencer, he also can’t say whether he prefers composing to performing.
 
“To be honest, I love them both for different reasons,” Levendofsky said. “They’re two different sides of the same coin. I’ll always end up doing both simultaneously. The reason I’ll pursue composition as instead of piano performance is I think there’s more of a demand for composing than piano performance.”
 
First-year Rock Creek band director Daniel Smith first got to know Levendofsky at a summer camp at Kansas State where he served as a counselor. Even then, he said Levendofsky stood out to him.
 
“He was pretty young but he was one of the top musicians at that camp,” Smith said. “In regards to music, he’s got a lot of potential to go really far post high school and I’m excited to see where he can go. He’s got a brilliant composing mind and a very, very strong performance mind as well.”
 
In addition to his musical exploits at Rock Creek, Levendofsky has his hands in other activities as well. He was a state qualifier in forensics last year and was a member of Rock Creek’s back-to-back Class 4A state championship Scholars Bowl team in 2022 and 2023.
 
The lone returner from last year’s state championship team this year, Levendofsky said the team was in a rebuilding season, but he still enjoyed captaining the squad.
 
“I love Scholars Bowl,” he said. “We all have different strengths so we’re helping each other out. It was very collaborative and very intense. It’s not a sport, but it definitely feels very athletic. You have to be fast and smart about what you do, it’s different from music and I need it to supplement my competitive side because I’m very competitive.”
 
Levendofsky competed in cross country in the past and plans to participate in track and field this spring. He’s also in the Art Guild and Environment Club.
 
But above everything else, it’s music that defines Levendofsky.
 
“For me, music is rawly emotional,” he said. “It’s not as literal as other art forms, like writing. It’s very interpretive and can connect with people in a lot of different ways. Especially with piano music. There’s no words, no real story. But it’s just your emotional response to it and that can be really powerful I think.”