UA Wind Ensemble – A Tribute to the Life of Professor Gregg Hanson

The University of Arizona Wind Ensemble
Chad R. Nicholson, music director and conductor
A Tribute to the Life of Professor Gregg Hanson

December 3, Saturday, 7:30p.m.
Crowder Hall, $10 

Maestro Fangfang Li, Principal Conductor and Artistic Director for the Beijing Wind Orchestra, is an active band and wind ensemble director in China and abroad.  He founded the Beijing Wind Orchestra in 2009 and founded and was the first chair of the Beijing Band Directors Association (2006-2018).  Also in Beijing, Maestro Li is Artistic Director for the Beijing Band Festival (2006-) and Director of the Back-Stage Bands for Operas at the National Center for Performing Arts (2009-).

Maestro Li’s educational background is international.  At a young age, Mr. Li began his musical journey studying violin and cello. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the Music College of Beijing Capital Normal University, he earned a diploma in wind ensemble conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music under Frank L. Battisti.  He also went on to complete a master’s degree in conducting under Gregg Hanson from the University of Arizona School of Music.

Li’s current illustrious directorship positions in China were preceded by many other accomplishments.  He founded and was the first Director/Conductor for the Chinese Armed Police Band Beijing (1986-2011), conductor for the Wind Ensemble of China’s Central Conservatory of Music (1998-2017), conductor of the China Conservatory of Music’s Wind Ensemble (2010-2013), and conductor of the Xi’an Conservatory Wind Ensemble (2004-2017). Maestro Li is also a board member of the Asian-Pacific Band Director Association and was Chair of APBDA Conference (2015-17).

Outside of China, Maestro Li  has had the great privilege of working with numerous ensembles from Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, including the Kazakhstan State Wind Orchestra, Korea Jeju Wind Orchestra, Singapore Wind Orchestra, Hong Kong Youth Symphonic Band, Tao Yuan City Wind Orchestra of Taiwan, Symphonic Wind Orchestra of Spain, Wind Ensemble of the State University of New York (Fredonia) School of Music, Colorado State University Music Festival Band, Wind Orchestra of the Eastman School of Music, Wind Ensemble of Adelaide University Australia, and the Wind Symphony of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Additionally, Li served on the selection committees for Korea’s Jeju International Wind Ensemble Festival, Hong Kong’s Governmental Music Office Band Competition, the Singapore National Arts Council Competition, and Spain’s Youth Band Festival.

His musical successes resulted in a 2019 invitation to be the Chief Artist in Residence at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

Mr. Li is the author of The Brief History of Western Wind Band and Its Important Repertoire and has also recorded several albums.

 

Dr. T. André Feagin serves as Director of Bands in the Department of Music at Central Washington University. In this position, he guides the educational and artistic vision of a comprehensive band program that includes the Wind Ensemble, Symphonic Winds, Symphonic Band, Wildcat Marching Band, and Pep Band. He heads the graduate wind band conducting program and serves as the conductor of the Wind Ensemble, the preeminent wind band at CWU. Under his leadership, the Wind Ensemble was a featured performer at the 2022 College Band Directors National Association Western/Northwestern Division Conference.

Dr. Feagin serves as Dean Fellow of Student Success in the College of Arts and Humanities at CWU. In this position, he coordinates a Living Learning Community (music) where his programming and mentorship focus on student academic success, community engagement/building, and creating a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.  In addition, he serves as chair of the diversity, equity, and inclusivity committee in the College of Arts and Humanities.

Dr. Feagin has appeared as a guest conductor with numerous All-state, regional honor bands, and professional bands and orchestras throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, and Southeast Asia. Recent engagements include serving as guest conductor with the Northwest Sinfonietta Orchestra (WA) and the 2019 American Spring Festival (Czech Republic). As a clinician/presenter, he has been invited to speak on conducting, diversity and inclusion in music education, and leadership at numerous music educators’ conferences across the United States and around the globe. In 2022 he was selected to present at the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles convention in Prague, Czech Republic.

Dr. Feagin holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in wind conducting from the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music where he was a student of the late Gregg I. Hanson. His doctoral research studies Spanish wind composer Bernardo Adam Ferrero and his wind composition Homenaje a Joaquín Sorolla.

 

Conductor Kevin Michael Holzman serves as the Director of Wind Studies and Head of the Division of Ensembles and Conducting and the University of Cincinnati College – Conservatory of Music. Holzman joined CCM’s as Assistant Director of Wind Studies in 2017, and assumed the Director of Wind Studies position in 2018. As Director of Wind Studies, Holzman serves as the music director for the CCM Wind Symphony (CCM’s premier large wind ensemble), CCM Musica Nova, and the CCM Chamber Winds, in addition to overseeing the CCM Wind Ensemble and CCM Brass Choir. His academic responsibilities include teaching graduate conducting and related courses, as well as the advising and mentoring of wind conducting students in CCM’s Masters and Doctoral programs. Holzman also serves as Director of the Cincinnati Youth Wind Ensemble program through the CCM Preparatory Department.

In 2019, Holzman was appointed Music Director and Chief Guest Conductor of the Beijing Wind Orchestra, China’s premier wind ensemble. Prior to his appointment at CCM, Holzman earned his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in conducting at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Music Director of the Eastman Wind Ensemble, Mark Scatterday, DMA. As the Frederick Fennell Conducting Fellow and 2016 recipient of the prestigious Walter Hagen Prize for Excellence in Conducting, Holzman served as Associate Conductor of the world-renowned Eastman Wind Ensemble and Eastman Wind Orchestra.

 

Chad Shoopman is the associate director of bands and director of athletic bands at the University of Arizona. His duties include conducting the UA Wind Symphony, directing The Pride of Arizona Marching Band and Pep Band, as well as teaching leadership and marching band techniques courses. A proud alumnus, Shoopman earned both his Bachelor of Music degree in music education (1996) and Master of Music degree in conducting performance (1999) at the University of Arizona. While at UA, he studied conducting with Gregg I. Hanson. He continued studying choral and orchestral conducting with Dr. John Sinclair at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Prior to his current appointment, Shoopman was a distinguished adjunct faculty member at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida where he taught film music history, trumpet, and conducting. He worked for the Walt Disney World Company conducting and performing countless multi-million-dollar studio projects for Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Disney Cruise Lines. He also worked as a conductor, performer, arranger, and choreographer for live shows seen by millions of guests throughout Walt Disney World including FutureCorps, Tomorrowland Countdown, Main Street Philharmonic, and Disney’s Candlelight Processional. As the most requested clinician for Disney Performing Arts (formerly Magic Music Days), he was honored to lead thousands of educational workshops for middle school, high school, and college bands and orchestras from all over the world. In 2010, Shoopman was appointed music director and conductor of the Brass Band of Central Florida. Under his baton, the BBCF won a national championship, recorded three albums, and earned the ranking of 13th best brass band in the world; the highest placement any band outside of Great Britain has ever achieved. He was known for innovative show designs and arrangements that appealed to a wide range of audiences while still maintaining artistic integrity in the ever-growing American brass band movement.

Professor Shoopman has enjoyed numerous guest-conducting, adjudication, and clinic appointments in the United States, Canada, Japan, Great Britain, Germany, France, and Australia. He is an active orchestral conductor, appearing with the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, the Florida Symphony Orchestra, and the Florida Lakes Symphony Orchestra. He has conducted various musical theater productions including “Shrek The Musical” & “The Pajama Game” and is recognized for being equally comfortable conducting a wide variety of musical styles and ensembles. He has appeared regularly as lead trumpet for Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, Arturo Sandoval’s LA All-Star Big Band, Chuck Owen and the Jazz Surge, and the hr- Big Band in Frankfurt, Germany, as well as symphony orchestras throughout the United States.

 

 

Dr. Chad R. Nicholson, Director of Bands at the University of Arizona Fred Fox School of Music, serves as the conductor of the University of Arizona Wind Ensemble and Chamber Winds. Additionally, he oversees the entire wind band program and instructs undergraduate and graduate wind conducting students. Nicholson has been active in all facets of music education. In 2009, he wrote a book designed to aid conductors in repertoire selection and concert programming titled Great Music for Wind Band.  He is a contributing author for the recently published sourcebook for music educators, Engaging Musical Practices,  and he has written articles for eight different volumes of Teaching Music through Performance in Band.

Dr. Nicholson’s experiences as a music educator span all ages and ensemble types. He has conducted many All-State and honor groups around the world. Nicholson is a Chief Guest Conductor of the Beijing Wind Orchestra, China’s first professional wind ensemble. In 2015, he was a member of a distinguished international panel of adjudicators for the All-Chinese Wind Band Contest. Nicholson has worked with ensembles spanning the United States and Asia, from New York’s Carnegie Hall to the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Dr. Nicholson has commissioned and premiered many new compositions for Wind Ensemble by such composers as David Maslanka, Steven Bryant, Jack Stamp, David Dzubay, James Stephenson, Steven Danyew, Joshua Hummel, and JoAnn Harris. He and his students have performed collaborations with significant conductors and composers, including Aaron Jay Kernis, Joseph Schwantner, Frank Ticheli, Libby Larsen, Johan de Meij, Joan Tower, and Ray Cramer.

Nicholson is a frequent presenter and performer at regional, national, and international conferences. Dr. Nicholson led his ensemble in performance at the Taiwan International Band Clinic in Taipei and at multiple College Band Director National Association Divisional Conferences. Nicholson has presented twice at the Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, and he was a featured presenter at the 2016 National Association for Music Education Conference in Texas. In January 2020, Dr. Nicholson will be the guest conductor at a band event in Tokyo that will include students from Rikkyo Senior High School and the American School in Japan.

Before his appointment at the University of Arizona, Dr. Nicholson served on the faculties at the University of Delaware, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, and Colorado State University. He was a public school teacher in Oregon and Oklahoma. His primary conducting mentors include William Wakefield, Ken Van Winkle, Stephen W. Pratt and Ray E. Cramer. Nicholson holds degrees from the University of Oklahoma (BME), New Mexico State University (MM), and Indiana University (DM).

---

About the Music

Serenade in D Minor

 t was in 1878 that Dvorák first incorporated the rhythms of Czech folk dances into his music. Along with the Slavonic Dances, he composed the Slavonic Rhapsodies, Bagatelles, Furiant for Piano, the String Sextet which received its premiere performance by Joseph Joachim and friends in Berlin – the first of Dvorák’s works to receive its premiere outside his native land, and the Serenade, op. 44. All of these works are amply endowed with the spirit of Czech folk music.

 he D-Minor Serenade opens with a movement remarkable for the regularity of its phrasing and the clarity of its formal design. The music, while fraught with Bohemian melodic idioms, offers no harmonic or formal surprises. The “B” section is in the expected relative major, and the reprise of “A” expands most agreeably into a tonic major coda containing recollective hints of the movement’s “B” material.

 he menuetto, the second movement, represents considerable sophistication: the phrases are often irregular, the harmonic departures are fairly extreme, and the first sub movement itself, reprised literally after the much faster Trio, is similar to a rondo form construct. The Trio, cast in the movement’s subdominant key, is a furiant begun without pause, bridged into by a passage of linking sixteenth notes in parallel thirds in the pair of clarinets. The Trio spends itself quickly and ends in silence. The return of the menuetto comes as a welcome relief.

 he heart of the Serenade, op. 44 is its third movement, set in the serenade’s dominant key. More than a little reminiscent of the parallel movement from Mozart’s Gran Partita, the Andante con moto offers arching antiphonal melodies over an ostinato bass and gently syncopated accompaniment in the horns. Perhaps most remarkably, at least in a formal sense, a deceptive cadence at measure 79 ushers in a long section of

new closing material, which yields to an equally substantial coda. The movement’s A-major finish prepares the Finale’s return to D minor.

 he finale is formally the most interesting of the movements. A 20-measure furioso introduction sets the stage for a restless main theme that sequences again and again into increasingly remote keys, and the eventual appearance of the movement’s second theme (an F-major country dance in clarinets over a broken octave bass) furnishes the most vigorous, full-hearted music of the entire composition. It is this theme that, during the development section, will form the basis for the darkest, most threatening-sounding stretto of the work. The movement lacks a formal recapitulation. Instead, a new pastoral-sounding theme furnishes an extended bridge to the reappearance of the closing material from the first movement; and this, in turn, is followed by a triumphant D-major coda in fast tempo.

– Courtesy of Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam

Symphony No. 2 (1985-86)

 Program Note 2016: Nearly thirty years have passed since the premiere of Symphony No. 2, the first of my seven symphonies for wind ensemble. In that time I have come to recognize that issues of transformation are at the heart of my work, initially my personal issues of loss, grief, and rage, then knowing that my own change is the start for some element of outward movement, for change in the world. This is a long, slow process, but it is the requirement of our time. The crux of Symphony No. 2 is the river metaphor of the second movement – crossing over to the other side…death, yes, but also movement away from ego/self and toward compassion.

 veryone knows that we are living in a seriously dangerous time. For me, Symphony No. 2 was my first awareness in artistic terms that this is the case. Nearly sixty years ago African writer Chinua Achebe wrote the renowned novel, Things Fall Apart. Chronicling the destruction of one life he hit upon what we must do to regain our balance: return to our deepest inner sources for sustenance and direction; return to the tradition of the art community: people selected and set apart to dream for the community as a whole. If art is worth anything it is this: it brings us back to dream time and the inner voice. It lets the heart speak, giving us answers that we cannot reach in any other way. This is why we make music.

 Program Note 1986: Symphony No. 2 was commissioned by the Big Ten Band Directors Association in 1983. I was asked to write a major work for full band. The Symphony was given its premiere at the 1987 CBDNA Convention in Evanston, Illinois. The performing group was the combined Symphonic Band and Symphonic Wind Ensemble of Northwestern University under the direction of John P. Paynter. The first movement is in sonata form. It travels with gathering force to a climax area halfway through, and then dissolves suddenly into a heated fantasia. A very simple restatement of the opening theme and a brief coda finish the movement. This music is deeply personal for me, dealing with issues of loss, resignation, and acceptance.

 he second movement opens with an arrangement of Deep River, a traditional African-American melody. The words of the song read in part: “Deep River, my home is over Jordan. Deep River, Lord, I want to cross over to camp ground.” The composition of this movement involved for me two meaningful coincidences. The body of the movement was completed, and then I came across Deep River while working on another project. The song and my composition fit as if made for each other, so I brought the song into the Symphony. The last notes were put onto the score of this movement almost to the hour of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. The power of these coincidences was such that I have dedicated this music to the memory of the astronauts who lost their lives: Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnick, Ellison S. Onizuka, Gregory B. Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe.

 he finale of this Symphony is once again in sonata form. There are three broad theme areas occupying more than a third of the movement, a development based primarily on themes one and three, a recapitulation (minus the third theme area), and a brief coda. The underlying impulse of this movement is an exuberant, insistent outpouring of energy, demanding a high level of playing precision and physical endurance from the performers.

– David Maslanka

Download The
Event Program