Aryan Shrivastava has a lot going on.

An eight-year veteran of SFCM's Pre-College Guitar program, Shrivastava's next stop is Pomona College, a private Southern California college with a slim 7% acceptance rate. But before he packed his bags, he was able to film another appearance on NPR's From the Top (FTT) series, slated to be released in September.

Shrivastava was named an FTT Media Lab Fellow for their 2025-2026 season and has already appeared on the popular show's channels, one of many SFCM students to do so. This is partially because of Pre-College Guitar Department Chair Scott Cmiel, who cultivated a relationship with the series after fielding a cold call seeking student performers from them in their very first season, 25 years ago. All told, 16 SFCM students have appeared on FTT via Cmiel. While in Pre-College, Shrivastava studied with Scott Gossage as well as Cmiel. ("They're both Scotts, so it was convenient," he quips.")

"Being featured nationally is exciting, of course, but it’s also incredibly helpful for college applications," Cmiel told FTT in March. "Students are very aware of how important those applications are and experiences like this help them stand out … In fact, one of my students later used ideas from her [FTT] interview responses in her college essays. Once you’ve reflected on those experiences, it becomes easier to articulate them elsewhere. Overall, I think From the Top provides an incredible growth experience for young musicians."

Shrivastava's talents extend far beyond the guitar neck, though. For his most recent FTT appearance, he performed his own arrangement for guitar and strings that combines Miguel Llobet's Variations on a Theme of Sor, Op. 15 with Antonio Vivaldi's La Follia based on the two pieces' similar chord progressions.

The 18-year-old is also a composer and has written pieces for a variety of ensembles, including guitar quartet, percussion ensemble, and brass quintet. His guitar quartet piece, Crepuscule, explores microtonal sounds: Two of the guitars are in standard tuning, with the others tuned a quarter-tone down from that, a compositional technique considerably outside of the average college freshman's toolbox.

Shrivastava came into the Pre-College Academy equally interested in composition as guitar. "There was a guitar student named Reade Park, and the first year I was here the quartet I was in played one of his pieces, and I was like, 'Oh, that's so cool,'" he says.  (Park won first prize at the Guitar Foundation of America’s 2022 International Youth Competition, Senior Division and has been featured by the Omni Foundation.) "Then during COVID, I got really into it, because I wasn't able to do a lot of other stuff.' I just want to keep getting inspired by things I hear and being like, 'Oh, I want to do something cool.'"

With Crepuscule, Shrivastava's experience as a cellist also came into play. "On guitar, you can do microtonal things without even thinking about it, because you can just tune them down, versus on violin or other strings, because you're very trained to always play in tune, and the smallest interval you're playing in Western music is a half-step."

Even with this already-impressive CV, Shrivastava is relentlessly low-key about his work. "I don't plan stuff," he says, "I hear something cool and I just do it."

Learn more about SFCM's Pre-College or its collegiate Guitar Department.