While some summer music festivals take months of planning, it took a group of Syracuse University students just 28 days to round-up 20 student acts for a year-end music festival.

ZestFest, a collaborative music and arts festival, is scheduled for 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 28, at the Westcott Theater. Planned by students from professor Daniel Mastronardi’s music industry classes, the festival organizer’s hope to bring the Syracuse community together in celebration of the last day of classes at Syracuse University.

In an email, Mastronardi said he has wanted to establish a student-planned festival through his different music industry classes since last year. He credits most of the work, however, to Mike Summergrad, a senior psychology major and a student in the 300-level music industry class.

“For music production 200, you have an end of the year presentation, and I would kind of say my presentation was ZestFest, in a way, just in a little bit of a different manner,” Summergrad said. “We had the idea to have a big last-day-of-class festival that Dan Mastronardi’s class could put on.”

ZestFest will serve as a catalyst to spark more events like this and to create a budget so that the class can put on smaller concerts throughout the semester, Summergrad said.

The students were delegated responsibilities to cover all aspects of planning a music festival. The class is hoping to bring out large crowds, as there will be music that suits a variety of musical tastes. There will be several bands, acoustic acts and DJs.

Melissa Martinez, a junior public relations major, is in charge of social media and marketing for the event. The class primarily used Facebook to promote ZestFest by sharing it with their friends and family, she said.

Martinez expects a big turnout because of the collaborative effort to sell tickets between students in Mastronardi’s classes and the acts that are scheduled to perform. The number of tickets an act sells will translate into how much money they will earn. This is an incentive to sell, Martinez said.

For Martinez, the out of class time commitment was not huge, but it was stressful at times to plan a music festival as large as ZestFest in such a short amount of time, she said. For Summergrad, though, there was a lot of work outside of the classroom. Mastronardi said his students will “100 percent” be putting on more events like ZestFest in the future.

“I think the selling factor is that you get to see a bunch of your friends on a bigger stage,” Summergrad said. “We all get to see our friends and people we have personal connections with display their talents on one of the bigger stages at the end of the year. People have been working up to this and it’s the last opportunity we’ll have to do it until September.”

Published on April 27, 2015 at 8:40 pm

Contact Chloe: cemeiste@syr.edu