UA EMERITUS MUSIC PROFESSOR TO PERFORM CONCERT ON OCT. 27

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Dr. John Cowell, emeritus professor and formerly professor of piano and theory and sometimes chair of the music department, will present a "Retrospective Concert" on Sunday, Oct. 27, featuring new and old works for a variety of performers.

The program will begin at 3 p.m., in the Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall of the Fine Arts Center at the University of Arkansas. General admission tickets are $5, and UA faculty, staff and seniors tickets are $1.

Sunday’s "Retrospective Concert" will hear the best of Crowell over a 45-year span. He will also include some significant solo concert pieces from a piano repertoire.

Works will include "Homage to Emily," based on three poems by Emily Dickinson, "Evocation," a piano solo originating from a work for the Seattle Ballet Academy in 1954, "Remembrances," which incorporates musical awakenings from Sunday School to country fiddling and early piano study, "Four Songs of Innocence for Soprano," "Eight Mysterious Canons for Piano," "Two Pieces for Clarinet and Piano," "Two Concert Songs for Mezzo Soprano and Piano," and "Sonata in D Flat."

Performers include Robert Umiker, UA emeritus professor, on clarinet; soprano Elizabeth Howick; mezzo soprano Patricia Gideon, UA music lecturer; Piotr Janowski, professor of music, on violin; Christopher Lacy, UA professor of music, on piano; and the Schola Cantorum, directed by Jack Groh, UA professor emeritus.

While at the U of A from 1966 until his official retirement in 1985, Cowell was also organist-choirmaster at St. Paul’s Episcipal Church in Fayetteville.

"Those were my most ambitious and fulfilling years in church music with the availability of faculty and gifted students to sing and play all needed instruments for performance of authentic historic works and my compositions," he said.

Throughout his tenure in Northwest Arkansas, he would spend his summer weeks in Switzerland at Hindemith’s last place of residence on Lake Geneva for Syracuse University’s summer graduate study for American students. He also represented Arkansas in the 1976 Parade of States at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., with compositions for orchestra, chorus and as piano soloists.

Throughout his lifetime, Cowell has served as organist-choirmaster at several churches, including Seattle’s Church of the Epiphany, Christ Church in Tacoma, Wash., St. Stephen’s Episcopal in Seattle, and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Fayetteville.

Cowell was born in Springhouse, Penn. and could read music before he even began attending school. After high school he won a full scholarship to The Juilliard School in New York, which included studying composition with the noted composer Paul Nordoff. In 1942, he graduated summa cum laude and received his induction notice into the U.S. Army in World War II, simultaneously.

"My draft board let me have a three-month deferral in order to accept a scholarship to the Berkshire Music Festival, commonly known as Tanglewood, as a student of Aaron Copeland," Cowell said. "After the summer at Tanglewood, it was off to the Army for the duration of the war."

After earning a commission as 2^nd Lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers, he got married and then attended the Yale School of Music as a composition student. After receiving his master’s degree at Yale, he was appointed to the music faculty of the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. During the span of 1956 to 1965, he was a guest soloist more than 25 times with the Seattle Symphony. In 1966, Cowell earned his doctorate in musical arts at the University of Washington, while also serving as dean of music at Cornish School of Music and Allied Arts in Seattle.

After receiving his doctorate degree, Cowell became chairman and professor at the University of Arkansas in 1966. After his retirement from the U of A in 1985, Cowell and his wife Eleanor moved back to Seattle and for the next three years he would substitute organ performance and professional musical organization work. During this interim period in his professional life, he decided to prepare for and take the American Guild of Organists’ rigorous accreditation. A year and a half stint at First Lutheran of nearby Bothell led to an 11-year position at University Lutheran in Seattle. On June 4, 2000, he retired from that position and became emeritus organist.

"During my 17 years since returning to Seattle, I have enjoyed teaching a delightful assortment of students of all ages," Cowell said. "My principal challenge now is taking stock of my entire life’s working composition and performance."

Cowell said he is currently editing a great mass of compositions as well as recordings from past performances, hoping to transfer the most significant of those to compact disc. He plans to eventually house his works and other memorabilia in Special Collections at Mullins Library at the U of A.