Retiring professor will star as featured composer
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Charles Argersinger indulges his love and
talent for jazz last year, playing with WSU
colleagues at Rico’s club in downtown
Pullman. (Photo by Robert HUbner, WSU
Photo Services)
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As the founder of the WSU Festival of Contemporary Art Music, Charles Argersinger has worked for the past 20 years to bring the best composers in the country to Pullman.
James Mobberly, the 1993 festival composer and the Curator’s Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, expressed it this way: “…there is a transparent quality in both mind and heart in the pieces. You can sense the logic on multiple levels, and you can also just close your eyes and feel the emotional shape of the music.”
Yasinitsky, director of WSU’s jazz studies program, was the head of the committee that hired Argersinger back in 1988.
Under Argersinger’s leadership, WSU students have had the opportunity to experience the best of contemporary composers. That will continue, even though Argersinger plans to join the ranks of emeritus faculty next month, a move that will allow him to concentrate his energies more fully on composing.