UWG Music Week
The Department of Music at the University of West Georgia will present its most brilliant students and faculty in a celebratory finale of the semester with concerts, workshops and recitals Nov. 27 – Dec. 2. The celebration ends with a three-day UWG Honor Band clinic, workshop and concert with the most talented middle and high school musicians in the region. All of the events are free and the community is invited to attend.
The music begins with a guest artist recital on Monday, Nov. 27, at 8:15 p.m. in Kathy Cashen Hall. Jennifer Griffith Cowgill, professor of voice at the University of Alabama, is a renowned artist who has performed in operas, oratorios and musicals throughout the southeast. She will perform works by Schumann, Strauss, Bernstein and Sondheim.
A repertoire of jazz takes over the following two evenings with the UWG Percussion Ensembles in the Townsend Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, Nov. 28, at 8:15 p.m., and the Jazz Combo Performance in Kathy Cashen Hall on Wednesday, Nov. 29, at 8 p.m.
The UWG ensembles will perform a wide range of mainstream and crossover jazz, west coast jazz, swing, fusion and Latin sounds.
The UWG Percussion Ensembles concert features the internationally renowned UWG Jazz Percussion Group, which recently performed in Antigua. The Concert Percussion Ensemble, another nationally recognized group of musicians, will join the group. Together they’ll perform new original compositions not heard in public before as well as familiar favorites. Dr. Doug Overmier, director of bands and percussion studies, will direct and perform with the ensembles.
The Jazz Combo Performance will present “An Evening in Jazz” with director and saxophonist Mariano Pacetti. Pacetti is instructor of jazz improvisation at West Georgia and has performed on stage with groups such as the Temptations, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. The show features two marimba players who will give their special interpretation of toe-tapping dance music and a solo performance by Pacetti.
Beginning on Thursday, Nov. 30, the brightest musicians from middle and high schools in the southeast will converge upon UWG for three days of performance, clinics, workshops and concerts with musicians at UWG.
The eighth annual event has drawn the top student musicians from Alabama, Florida and Georgia selected as the best in their schools to perform in two UWG Honor Bands. The students will learn from the talent at West Georgia as they rehearse and perform with the UWG faculty and music majors.
The young musicians will participate in master classes and private lessons taught by UWG faculty and then perform in the Townsend Center as Honor Bands on Friday and Saturday nights to a standing room only crowd.
Middle school students in the UWG Honor Band will perform on Friday and high school students in the UWG Honor Band will perform on Saturday. Both concerts begin at 7 p.m. and will feature a video feed in the Black Box Theatre.
Alan Armstrong, a music teacher at Northgate High School in Newnan, and Dr. Michael Votta, Jr., a professor of music and director of the North Carolina Wind Orchestra at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will be guest conductors of the UWG Honor Bands. Overmier is coordinating the three-day event.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for everyone to learn from each other,” said Overmier. “It is a convergence of some of the greatest music talent in the southeast. I am proud that the University of West Georgia can provide this wonderful opportunity for future professional musicians and for future UWG music majors.”
West Georgia’s music program was chosen as one of 200 best in the nation this year by Creative Colleges: A Guide for Student Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians and Writers in 2006.
For more information, call 678-839-6516.
