Guest Composer to Appear at Tech

The Arkansas Tech University Symphonic Wind Ensemble will welcome composer Dr. Paul Dooley to campus as part of a “New Music Celebration” concert at Witherspoon Auditorium on Saturday, Nov. 21.

The performance will begin at 2:30 p.m. Admission will be free and open to the public.

Among the pieces that will be performed is Dooley’s “Masks and Machines.” Arkansas Tech was part of a conglomerate of universities and colleges from around the United States that commissioned the work in honor of Gary Green, chair of musical performance in the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, on the occasion of his retirement earlier this year.

Green was a mentor for Dr. Daniel A. Belongia, associate professor of music and director of bands at Arkansas Tech. Belongia will conduct the ensemble on Saturday.

Dooley wrote that “Masks and Machines” was “inspired by the early twentieth century works of Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer and the neoclassical music of Igor Stravinsky.”

He also noted that the piece “contains three contrasting character pieces featuring renaissance brass music, Baroque fortspinnung in virtuosic mallet percussion, lush oboe, clarinet and bassoon solos and machine-like flute rips.”

A lecturer in performing arts technology at the University of Michigan, Dooley won the 2013 Jacob Druckman Award for orchestral composition, a 2010 BMI composer award, a 2008 ASCAP Morton Gould Composer Award and a fellowship to the Aspen Music Festival Composition master class with Christopher Rouse.

The Arkansas Tech Symphonic Wind Ensemble will also perform new pieces by Michael Daugherty and Tech faculty member Philip Parker during Saturday’s concert. Dr. Nicolas del Grazia, associate professor of music at Arkansas Tech, will join the ensemble on clarinet.

Call (479) 968-0368 or visit www.atu.edu/music to learn more about public performances hosted by the Arkansas Tech Department of Music.