Stieren Arts Enrichment Series Set at Trinity

Trinity University will open the spring 2018 Stieren Arts Enrichment Series in January with a Celebration of Living Composers, featuring world-renowned musical artists Carter Pann, Forrest Pierce, and Dan Forrest. The series will continue in February and March with five additional presentations.

Composers Pann, Pierce, and Forrest will participate in a multi-faceted residency on Jan. 13-14. Each composer will present a short introduction to his works, participate in open panel discussions, and give a master class for student composers. In addition, the Trinity University Music Department will present two concerts featuring works by both the Stieren Guest Artists and Trinity composition students, performed by Music Department students and faculty members. All events are free and open to the public and will be held in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall. For information, call 210-999-8212.

Pann has written for and worked with musicians around the world, including the London Symphony and the Tchaikovsky Symphony in Moscow. He has written for Richard Stoltzman,  the Capitol Saxophone Quartet, the West Coast Wind Quintet, and the River Oaks Chamber Ensemble. Awards include a Charles Ives Fellowship, a Masterprize seat in London, five ASCAP awards and two Grammy® nominations. Pann was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2016. He is a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

Pierce, a composer and poet, has written 200 works of vocal, chamber, and choral music. He has won the Barlow Prize, the Ortus and Avalon international competitions, and international competitions of the Boston Chamber Singers and Boston Choral Ensemble. Pierce was educated at Indiana University, University of Minnesota, and University of Puget Sound and has been a student of tango, piano, North Indian classical singing, cello, poetry, and Chishti Sufism. He is a professor at the University of Kansas and is also on the faculty of the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Cortona, Tuscany.

Forrest’s music has become well-established in the repertoire of choirs in the U.S and abroad through his major works Requiem for the Living and Jubilate Deo. His music has received dozens of awards and distinctions with premieres in major venues around the world. He holds graduate degrees in composition and piano performance and is active as a composer, educator, and pianist.

The event schedule for the Celebration of Living Composers is:

• Saturday, Jan. 13: Works presented at 1 p.m. by Pann, at 2:15 p.m. by Pierce, and by Forrest at 3:30 p.m. A panel discussion will be held at 5 p.m. A concert will be held at 7:30 p.m.

• Sunday, Jan. 14: A panel discussion will be held at 12:30 p.m., with a concert at 3 p.m.

All events for the Celebration of Living Composers will be held in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.

Other series artists are:

Debbie Millman, author, educator, and brand strategist, who will present a lecture at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 6, in the Great Hall of the Chapman Center. Her talk is titled “Why We Brand, Why We Buy: An Anthropological Look at Why We Love Our Smart Phones.” The host of the podcast Design Matters, her written and visual essays have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, New York Magazine, Print Magazine, Design Observer, and Fast Company. She also is the author of six books. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Boston Biennale, Chicago Design Museum, Anderson University, School of Visual Arts, Long Island University, The Wolfsonion Museum, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art. She has been artist-in-residence at Cranbrook University, Old Dominion University, and Notre Dame University. For 20 years, Millman was the president of the design division at Sterling Brands, where she worked with more than 200 of the world’s largest brands, including the redesign of Burger King and merchandising for Star Wars.

Jennifer Egan, author, who will present a reading with commentary at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Feb. 27, in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall. Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at Me, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her most recent book is the novel Manhattan Beach. Egan is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and  Harper’s

Timothy Mahr, music professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., will be present at a  concert at 3 p.m., Sunday, March 4, in the Ruth Taylor Recital Hall, where the Trinity University Symphonic Wind Ensemble will debut his Symphony No. 1. The composer also will be a Stieren Guest Artist in Residence from Feb. 28 through March 4. The March 4 concert will include the Trinity University Symphonic Wind Ensemble and a guest appearance by the Helotes Area Community Band. At St. Olaf College, Mahr conducts the St. Olaf Band and teaches courses in composition, conducting, and music education and is also the principal conductor of the Minnesota Symphonic Winds. Perhaps best known as a composer, Mahr has written more than 50 works, including the 1991 ABA/Ostwald Award winning “The Soaring Hawk,” and has received more than 30 commissions including works for the U.S. Air Force Band and the Music Educators National Conference.

Aquila Theatre, the New York City-based foremost producers of classical touring theatre, will present William Shakespeare’s Hamlet at 7:30 p.m., Monday, March 5, in Stieren Theater and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 6 in Stieren Theater.

During nationwide tours, Aquila provides extensive educational programming and is known for its innovative humanities and arts-based public programs. The company visits 50 to 60 American cities a year and travels abroad with a program of two plays, workshops, and educational programming and has performed at the White House twice. Aquila has received a Chairman's Special Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its innovative applied theater public programming. The artistic director is Desiree Sanchez.

Photographers William Wylie and Jae Emerling will present a lecture at 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 7, in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall.

Emerling is a professor of modern and contemporary art in the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte and is the director of the College of Arts + Architecture Honors Program. He is the author of Theory for Art History and award-winning Photography: History and Theory and is working on a book about the aesthetic-historiographic concept of transmissibility. Emerling’s work has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture; History of Photography; CAA Reviews; Journal of Art Historiography; X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly; Contemporary Art about Architecture; Bergson and The Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film; and a special issue of the Journal of Visual Culture titled “Architecture!”

Wylie’s photographs and short films have been shown nationally and internationally. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and Yale University Art Museum. He has published four books: Riverwalk, Stillwater, Carrara, and Route 36, and two more are scheduled for publication in 2018. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a VMFA Professional Fellowship, and the Yale Gallery of Art’s Doran / LeWitt Fellowship in 2012 and 2014. He teaches photography and is director of the studio art department at the University of Virginia.

The opening reception to Wylie’s exhibit, Shadows of the Future Anterior, will follow the lecture. The exhibit runs in the Neidorff Art Gallery in the Dicke Art Building from Feb. 22 to March 31.

The Stieren Arts Enrichment Series is made possible by an endowment gift from Jane and the late Arthur Stieren of San Antonio.