The UW Wind Ensemble and Symphonic Band present their fall quarter concert, performing the Northwest premiere of A Concerto of Colours (2017) by Stephen Goss with faculty guitarist Michael Partington.
A Concerto of Colours, Stephen Goss
Smoke and Mirrors, Erica Muhl
Requiem, David Maslanka
Toward the Splendid City, Richard Danielpour, arr. Peter Stanley Martin
Michael Partington, guitar
Michael Partington is one of the most engaging of the new generation of concert players. Praised by Classical Guitar Magazine for his “lyricism, intensity and clear technical command,” this award-winning British guitarist has performed internationally as a soloist and with ensemble to unanimous critical praise. Audiences are put at ease by his charming stage manner and captivated by his musical interpretations. His innate rhythmic understanding and sense for tonal colour combine to form some of the most memorable phrasing to be heard on the guitar.
He began playing guitar at age 6 while growing up in Wales, gave his first public performance at age 7 and won his first competition at age 9. He has trained with many of the world’s greatest guitarists, including Oscar Ghiglia, Eliot Fisk, Eduardo Fernandez, Manuel Barrueco and David Russell, who commented on his “exquisite good taste and fluid perfection.”
Mr. Partington has appeared throughout the USA, UK, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia in solo recital, with orchestra and in chamber ensembles. His North American appearances include the first solo guitar recital in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, as well as Town Hall and Meany Theater in Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, New Haven, Phoenix, Portland, Reno, San Francisco, Vancouver and many others. Concerts in England and Wales have included Blackheath Halls, the Royal College of Music, St. Martin-in-the-Fields and St. James’, Piccadilly in London; the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff; St. Mary in the Castle, Hastings; Bristol Music Club; Russell-Cotes Museum, Bournemouth; Brewery Arts Centre, Kendall; Trinity Arts Centre, Tunbridge Wells; Nottingham; Carlisle; Derby; and others. He has performed live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, BBC Radio Bristol, BBC Wales and Great Western Radio in the UK, as well as St. Paul Sunday on National Public Radio in the US, KUOW, KING FM, KZAZ, and KAOS in Washington, JPR in Oregon, KUT in Texas, and cable television in California, Montana and Washington.
An advocate of new music, he has commissioned and premiered works by Stephen Goss, Bryan Johanson, Toshio Hosokawa, Angelo Gilardino, Tom Baker, Kevin Callahan and others. He is a frequent performer and teacher at festivals, including the Guitar Foundation of America Festival, Llantilio Crossenny Festival, La Guitarra California, Columbus Guitar Symposium, Appalachian Guitar Festival, Portland Guitar Festival, Northwest Guitar Festival, Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Cascadia Festival and Chelan Bach Fest. He has also performed with Seattle Opera, Seattle Chamber Players, Seattle Pro Musica, Orchestra Seattle, Philharmonia Northwest, Seattle Creative Orchestra, Wenatchee Valley Symphony, Rainier Symphony, Portland State University Orchestra, Seattle Symphony Chorale, Seattle Choral Company, and flutist Paul Taub in the duo Dinamici. Mr. Partington is frequently invited to adjudicate or sit on the jury for local, national and international competitions in the US and Canada, including the Guitar Foundation of America competition, the National finals for the Federation of Canadian Music Festivals, the Music Teachers of North America national finals and the Portland Guitar Competition. He has released 8 solo CDs for Rosewood Recordings, and is also featured on releases on the Cadenza Music and Present Sounds labels.
Director Bios
Timothy Salzman, Wind Ensemble
Timothy Salzman is in his 31st year at the University of Washington where he serves as Professor of Music/Director of Concert Bands, is conductor of the University Wind Ensemble and teaches students enrolled in the graduate instrumental conducting program. Former graduate wind conducting students of Professor Salzman have obtained positions at forty-five colleges and universities throughout the United States.
Prior to his appointment at the UW he served for four years as Director of Bands at Montana State University where he founded the MSU Wind Ensemble. From 1978 to 1983 he was band director in the Herscher, Illinois, public school system where the band program received several regional and national awards in solo/ensemble, concert and marching band competition.
Professor Salzman holds degrees from Wheaton (IL) College (Bachelor of Music Education), and Northern Illinois University (Master of Music in low brass performance), and studied privately with Arnold Jacobs, former tubist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has numerous publications for bands with the C. L. Barnhouse, Arranger's Publications, Columbia Pictures, Hal Leonard Publishing and Nihon Pals publishing companies, and has served on the staff of new music reviews for The Instrumentalist magazine.
Professor Salzman has been a conductor, adjudicator, arranger or consultant for bands throughout the United States and in Canada, England, France, Russia, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, China, and Japan, a country he has visited twenty-one times. Recently he has frequently travelled to China where he served as visiting professor at the China Conservatory, given master classes for numerous wind bands, and conducted several ensembles including: the Shanghai Wind Orchestra on their 15th Anniversary Concert in Philharmonic Hall in Shanghai; the People's Liberation Army Band in two concerts (2009/10); the Beijing Wind Orchestra in a concert appearance at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Tiananmen Square; and the Tsinghua University Band in a concert in December of 2016. He also served on three occasions as an adjudicator for the Singapore Youth Festival National Concert Band Championships.
He is compiling editor and co-author (with several current and former UW graduate students) of A Composer's Insight: Thoughts, Analysis and Commentary on Contemporary Masterpieces for Wind Band, a five-volume series of books on contemporary wind band composers published by Meredith Music Publications, a subsidiary of the Hal Leonard Corporation. He is an elected member of the American Bandmasters Association and is a past president of the Northwest Division of the College Band Directors National Association.
Under Professor Salzman’s direction the University of Washington Wind Ensemble has performed at a number of prestigious music conventions, has presented several world premiere performances of outstanding new music for wind band and in 2004, undertook a highly acclaimed nine-day concert tour of the Kansai region of Japan, returning for more extensive tours of that country in 2007 and 2010. The UW Wind Ensemble presented several concerts in the main concert venues of Beijing, China in March of 2013, including a sold-out concert in the National Center for the Performing Arts in Tiananmen Square that was broadcast nationwide on China Central Television. The ensemble returned to China for a series of concerts in Beijing and Shanghai in 2016 playing before sold-out crowds in both cities. In the spring of 2006, the ensemble was invited by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra to present a concert at Benaroya Hall as a part of the Symphony’s Made in America Festival. The London Financial Times review of the concert applauded “music of surprising sophistication…Cindy McTee’s Finish Line pulsated energetically and William Bolcom’s Song was simply gorgeous.” Subsequent to the 2006 performance the ensemble was invited for return appearances on Seattle Symphony concert series in 2007, 2008 and, most recently in 2011 when Maestro Gerard Schwarz conducted the ensemble. The UW Wind Ensemble has also collaborated with a number of internationally renowned guest artists, conductors and composers including Eddie Daniels, Steve Houghton, Allen Vizzutti, Jeffery Fair, Chris Olka, James Walker, Douglas Yeo, Leigh Howard Stevens, David Maslanka, Michael Colgrass, Cindy McTee, Eric Ewazen, Satoshi Yagisawa, David Stanhope, John DiCesare, David Gordon, Mary Lynch, Seth Krimsky, Michael Brockman and Huck Hodge. In July of 2008 Nihon Pals, a music education resource company based in Osaka, Japan, released a set of instructional DVDs regarding the subject of building ensemble musicality featuring the UW Wind Ensemble.
Steven Morrison, Symphonic Band
Steven Morrison is Professor and Chair of Music Education at the University of Washington. An instrumental music specialist, Professor Morrison teaches courses in music education, music psychology, and research methodology and conducts the UW Symphonic Band. He has taught at the elementary, junior high and senior high levels in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Louisiana and has conducted and arranged for bands, orchestras, and chamber groups throughout the United States.
Dr. Morrison is director of the Laboratory for Music Cognition, Culture and Learning investigating neurological responses to music listening, perceptual and performance aspects of pitch-matching and intonation, and use of expressive gesture and modeling in ensemble teaching. His research also includes music preference and the variability of musical responses across diverse cultural contexts.
Prior to joining the UW faculty, Morrison served as Lecturer of Fine Arts at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He has spoken and presented research throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, China, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. During 2009 he served as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and as a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Music and Science at the University of Cambridge.
Morrison’s articles have appeared in Music Educators Journal, Journal of Research in Music Education, Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education, Music Perception, Frontiers in Psychology, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, Missouri Journal of Research in Music Education, Southwestern Musician, and Southern Folklore. Along with collaborator Steven M. Demorest, his research into music and brain function has appeared in Neuroimage, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Progress in Brain Research and The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
He is also a contributing author to The Science and Psychology of Music Performance, published by Oxford University Press, the new Oxford Handbook of Music Education, the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience and the text Musician and Teacher: An Orientation to Music Education, authored by UW colleague Patricia Shehan Campbell and published by W.W. Norton.
Morrison is Editor of the Journal of Research in Music Education for which he also served on the editorial board. He is also on the editorial boards of Reviews of Research in Human Learning and Music and the Asia-Pacific Journal for Arts Education. Morrison has served on the executive board of the Society for Research in Music Education and is currently a member of the advisory board for the Asia-Pacific Symposium on Music Education Research. He is past University Curriculum Chair for the Washington Music Educators Association and an honorary member of the Gamma chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi.
He holds a B.M. from Northwestern University, an M.M. from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University.