Percussion Recital: Sounds of the Earth
Sunday, October 26, 2015 • 6:30-8:00 PM • Center for the Arts Room 1111
Dr. John Pennington, Professor of Music and Percussion Studies at Augustana University will be performing pieces of his own as well as works by Paul Creston, Isaac Albeniz, J. S. Bach, and Keith Jarrett on instruments that are more traditionally associated with ensemble performance and not solo performance, such as the riq, caxixi, bodhran, gaval, and ganza.
John Pennington is an educator, composer, performer, author,producer and conductor. Dr. Pennington is currently a Professor of Music at Augustana College and is the Artistic Director of the Animas Music Festival in Durango, Colorado. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Arizona, and Arizona State. As an Orchestral player Dr. Pennington is currently the Associate Principal Timpanist and Percussionist with the South Dakota Symphony and Principal Timpanist with the Music in the Mountains Music Summer Festival Orchestra. Dr. Pennington is currently a Cultural Envoy for the State Department in the Middle East (Lebanon) where he presented concerts, clinics and master classes. With performances on four continents and over twenty-five states he has performed on Prairie Home Companion and been a featured performer at six Percussive Arts Society International Conventions.
Active as a composer and arranger he has over thirty compositions for soloist, duo, chamber and films and dozens of arrangements for numerous instrumental and vocal combinations. With over thirty recordings to date he has recorded for the Ensemble 21, Summit, Cristo, OCP, and Equilibrium labels. Extensive studies in world music have included experience in African, Middle Eastern, Indonesian, Cuban and the South Indian Karnatak tradition. Recently, Dr. Pennington continues to study the Northern Hindustani traditions of music in Haridwar and Delhi, India and the Javanese and Balinese traditions of Indonesia. Please visit JohnPennington.com for more information.
Dr. José Luis Hurtado awarded prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship
Composer and pianist José Luis Hurtado, an associate professor in The University of New Mexico’s Department of Music in the College of Fine Arts, is one of the 2020 winners of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
You Can’t Tell It Like I Can: Black Women, Music, and the Struggle for Social Justice in America
This lecture/performance explores how black women have used music as a method of shaping the public rhetoric and sentiment surrounding the black civil rights struggle in America. Through a historical framework that moves through the height of the abolitionist movement, the Popular front during the 1930s and 1940s, the frontlines of the direct action campaigns of the 1960s, and the proliferation of the Black Power movement in the 1970s.
An Americanish Songbook: Linda Ronstadt’s “other” Country
This talk will consider performances and recordings by singer Linda Ronstadt to propose what I refer to as her Americanish musical songbook. The suffix “ish” here intends to accentuate the “somewhat” or “to some extent” of “American” that Ronstadt—Tucson born and raised—lived and sonically imagined through her extraordinary musical career.