[386] Stones River Chamber Players Celebrate MTSU Centennial April 4

STONES RIVER CHAMBER PLAYERS CELEBRATE MTSU CENTENNIAL APRIL 4
‘Happy Birthday, MTSU!’ to Feature Works by Faculty, Alumni

FOR RELEASE: March 30, 2011
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Tim Musselman, 615-898-2493, tmusselm@mtsu.edu

MURFREESBORO—The Stones River Chamber Players will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of MTSU in the final concert of its 2010-11 season, “Happy Birthday, MTSU!”, on Monday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m.
The ensemble-in-residence at MTSU will feature musical works by MTSU faculty and graduates in the free public program, which will be held in the T. Earl Hinton Hall in the Wright Music Building on the MTSU campus.
First on the program will be “The Sayings of Yogi Berra” by MTSU faculty guitarist Roger Hudson. Professor Dina Cancryn, soprano, will perform the piece with Dr. William Yelverton and Hudson on guitars.
“The whimsical texts of the flamboyant Yankees star are certain to catch the imagination both of sports and music fans,” said Dr. Lynn Rice-See, coordinator of keyboard studies at MTSU and co-director of the SRCP.
A composition by MTSU alumnus Christopher Hallum, “Meditation on a Hymn Tune by W. H. Sims,” is the second piece in the program and includes a melody composed by Hallum’s great-grandfather, Rice-See said.
“The work uses as its basis a fragment of a tune called ‘Charles,’ composed to honor [Sims’] two sons-in-law, both named Charles,” explained Hallum, now a graduate student in composition at the University of Texas.
“The piece, apparently simple, subtly uses a number of sophisticated contrapuntal devices,” added Rice-See, who will be the pianist on the work and will be joined by Professors Andrea Dawson on violin and Angela DeBoer on horn and Henry Haffner, an adjunct professor of music at New College Franklin and Lexington (Ky.) Philharmonic and Nashville Symphony Orchestras performer, on viola.
Ken Davies, another MTSU alumnus, will be represented by “Three Pieces for Bass Trombone and Piano” in the SRCP performance. Davies, who earned a graduate degree in composition at the University of Colorado after his study at MTSU, now lives on the Gulf Coast.
“This work won first prize in the 2009 Eastern Trombone Workshop Trombone Composition Competition,” said Dr. David Loucky, MTSU professor of trombone. “The third movement alternates ragtime and funk feels.”
Loucky and MTSU pianist and adjunct professor Sandra Arndt will perform Davies’ work.
Dawson, DeBoer and Rice-See will premiere a new work, “Smoky Mountain Autumn,” by Dr. Paul Osterfield, professor of music composition and theory at MTSU.
“This three-movement work creatively weaves aspects of Appalachian indigenous music into a very contemporary harmonic idiom,” Rice-See said.
MTSU wind faculty members Deanna Little (flute), Todd Waldecker (clarinet) and Maya Stone (bassoon) will perform another premiere work for the SRCP performance, this one by faculty composer Dr. Spencer Lambright.
"Lambright's ‘Trio’ is a work indicative of his style of writing, which focuses on texture, timbre and the use of silence,” Stone said. “As in his other pieces, Lambright once again is successful in creating a work that inspires imagination.”
The celebration’s finale will unite jazz-faculty trumpeter Jamey Simmons with his brass quintet—DeBoer, Loucky, trumpeter Dr. Michael Arndt, and music-performance graduate student and tubist Andrew Noble—for “Fantasy on a Theme” by John Coltrane.
“The theme permeates the work in a way that involves a synergy between the traditional jazz idiom and contemporary brass techniques,” DeBoer said.
The April 4 performance is free and open to the public. For more information on this and other concerts in the MTSU School of Music, call 615-898-2493 or click on the “Concert Calendar” link at www.mtsumusic.com.


Founded in 1911, Middle Tennessee State University is a Tennessee Board of Regents institution located in Murfreesboro and is the state’s largest public undergraduate institution. MTSU now boasts one of the nation’s first master’s degree programs in horse science, and the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington, D.C., acclaims MTSU’s Master of Science in Professional Science degree—the only one in Tennessee—as a model program. MTSU recently unveiled three new doctoral degrees in the sciences.

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IN BRIEF: The Stones River Chamber Players will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of MTSU in the final concert of its 2010-11 season, “Happy Birthday, MTSU!”, on Monday, April 4, at 7:30 p.m. The ensemble-in-residence at MTSU will feature musical works by MTSU faculty and graduates in the free public program, which will be held in the T. Earl Hinton Hall in the Wright Music Building on the MTSU campus. For more information on this and other concerts in the MTSU School of Music, call 615-898-2493 or click on the “Concert Calendar” link at www.mtsumusic.com.

For MTSU news and information anytime, visit www.mtsunews.com.

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