Nature Made: Student-Composers Featured in the Arkansas New Music Ensemble's Final Spring Concert

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Arkansas is known throughout the country for its natural beauty, clear lakes and streams,and abundance of natural wildlife. Arkansas is also a training ground for young composers. In its final concert of the 2014-15 season, the Arkansas New Music Ensemble will present a concert featuring these composers. Entitled Nature Made, the performance will take place at 8 p.m. Friday, April 24, in the Fine Arts Center's Stella Boyle Smith Concert Hall. The night will be a celebration of compositional works by current and former students at the University of Arkansas.

"It's incredibly important to celebrate musicians in Arkansas, because I don't think many people are aware of the opportunities they have to hear great music being made right in their back yards," says Michael Roe, graduate teaching assistant in the University of Arkansas percussion studio.

"The piece I composed is entitled Indefinite Architectures. It is a three-movement work written for keyboard percussion sextet, with each movement representing a different type of cloud formation. It's certainly not the greatest piece to have been written in Arkansas," said Roe, "but I think that's what this concert is all about. It's about giving student composers an outlet to express their voice through musical composition." 

Michael Roe will continue his education next semester at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He will be pursuing his doctorate in percussion performance.

Variations on a Lydian Theme, a harp solo composed by sophomore trombone performance major Henry Bowen, will also be performed.  "When I set out to write a piece for harp, I had to become familiar with the instrument before writing down notes. The harp has physical limitations and a pedal system that require the player to shift constantly with their feet as the key signature changes in the music" said Bowen.

"While it has some limitations, the harp has the ability to play many complex patterns of notes, as the instrument spans several octaves" said Bowen. "Variations on a Lydian Theme is a piece written for Devanee Williams, a student studying harp performance at the University of Arkansas."

The concert is presented by the department of music inside the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences the public is invited and admission is free.