Works of five composers featured at Festival

 

The featured composer this year is Charles Argersinger, the founding director of the festival and a long-time member of the WSU School of Music faculty. His music will be performed during the Guest Composer Concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 7, at Bryan Hall Theatre.

 

Works by Ryan Hare, H. James Schoepflin, Aleks Sternfeld-Dunn and Gregory Yasinitsky will be performed at the festival’s Faculty Composers Concert at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5, in Bryan Hall Theatre.

 

All festival events are open free to the public. The full schedule of performances is online @ http://www.libarts.wsu.edu/artmusic/schedule/index.asp.

 

Argersinger, coordinator of the music composition and theory program at WSU, serves on the national council of the Society of Composers Inc. as the co-chair of the Pacific Northwest region. Among his honors, he earned first prize for a brass fanfare in 1995 for the United Nations’ 50th anniversary. He completed a doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1979 with Dominick Argento.

 

To listen to Argersinger’s music, visit his site @ http://www.charlesargersinger.com/ and choose Audiofiles to experience more than a dozen of his compositions. A number of his best known works are there including “Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra.” The concerto has been recorded by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, and performed by major orchestras across the country.

 

Also available for listening is his “Seven Degrees of Freedom,” a nonet for combined woodwind quintet and string quartet composed for the All-Nations Ensemble of Southeast Asia. The prime minister of Thailand commissioned the work which had is premiere in Bangkok in 2003.

 

Samplings of the other composers’ works are available for listening at the WSU School of Music Web site @ http://libarts.wsu.edu/music/audio/composition/index.htm