Guest cellist scheduled at Southeastern October 31


Contact: Tonya Lowentritt
Date: October 19, 2012

      HAMMOND – Guest artist Craig Hultgren will perform a recital at Southeastern Louisiana University on Wednesday, October 31.

     Scheduled at 7:30 p.m. in the Pottle Recital Hall as part of Fanfare, Southeastern's month-long celebration of the arts, the free recital will feature contemporary works for solo and cello and cello with electronics, as well as world premieres by Southeastern faculty Keri Besharse and Philip Schuessler.

     Hultgren will play a solo program of recent compositions for cello. The concert features works by living composers and includes works with amplification, audio soundfile playback and a computer score-reading tablet. All of the pieces have been written for Hultgren.

     The program includes two world premiere performances of works for cello and electronics by Schuessler and Besharse. The concert will begin with two acoustic compositions – "Only Four?" by Charles Knox, professor emeritus at Georgia State University, and "As Guilty as the Artist, No 2," by Mark Gresham, music critic for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

     Other electronic pieces on the program are "Red Plumes" by Indiana University composer John Gibson and "The Ninth Wave" by Robert Scott Thompson, who teaches at Georgia State University. Hultgren will also perform one of his own unique improvisations.

     For several decades Hultgren has been a proponent for new music, the newly creative arts, and the avant-garde. In recent years, he has performed solo concerts and chamber music in Rome, Boston, Pittsburgh, Miami, Atlanta, Orlando, Denver, Nashville, Memphis and San Antonio. A recipient of two Artist Fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, he was a member for many years of Thámyris, a contemporary chamber music ensemble in Atlanta.

     A long-time cellist in the Alabama Symphony, he also plays in Luna Nova, a new music ensemble with a large repertoire of performances available as podcast downloads on iTunes. Hultgren is featured in three solo CD recordings including The Electro-Acoustic Cello Book on Living Artist Recordings.

     For 10 years, he produced the Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial, an international competition that highlighted the best new compositions for the instrument. Last year, he completed a three-year stint as a CAMA artist for the St. Louis New Music Circle.

     He teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the Alabama School of Fine Arts and Birmingham-Southern College, where he has directed the BSC New Music Ensemble. He is a founding member and current president of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, an active group of composers and new music enthusiasts.

     He also serves on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Youth Orchestras of Central Alabama. This organization has instituted an important program called Scrollworks that offers free music instruction to at-risk, inner-city youth.

     For more information, contact the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at 985-549-2184.



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