Everything Band Podcast
Dr. Ronald Wooten is a professor of music at Northern Illinois University and has a long history of success as a band director and music educator. He joined the show to spin an entertaining story of his life and share some tremendous wisdom.
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In this special episode we welcome Colin Peters and Jake Walker to the podcast and interview them to learn their stories and hear their plans for the future of the podcast. Topics covered include origin stories, teaching during COVID, teaching beginners, and their answers to the big questions.
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Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin is the director of bands at Penn State University. She joined the show to share the story of her career, challenges that she has faced, and some thoughts about concert band programming.
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Jared Cassedy is the current band director at Lexington High School in Massachusetts, after teaching in New Hampshire for many years. He was the 2015 recipient of the Grammy Music Educator of the Year award and offers some great perspective for all band directors.
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Steve Danyew is a composer living in Rochester, New York. He has written several very successful for band, including Magnolia Star and Into the Silent Land.
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Frank Troyka was a longtime band director in Richardson, Texas and now serves as an adjunct instructor at SMU, educational consultant for Conn-Selmer, and director of education for System Blue.
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Allan McMurray enjoyed a 35 year career as the Director of Bands at the University of Colorado. Over the course of his remarkable career he has earned numerous honors and awards and is a past president of CBDNA.
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Mark Spede is the band director at Clemson University and the current president of the College Band Directors National Association. In this episode he shares his story and talks about CBDNA’s role in funding the aerosol study at the University of Colorado.
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Michael Giannetta is the band director at Oyster Bay High School on Long Island. He has been a band director for 18 years and joins the show to talk about his program and also the Long Island Wind Ensemble.
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Susan L. Smith has taught general, choral, and instrumental music at the elementary through collegiate level in Florida, Virginia and Alabama and has served as an author, clinician, conductor, and adjudicator across the United States
info_outlineEpisode 53 - Alex Shapiro
Composer Alex Shapiro kicks off year two of the podcast with a terrific conversation about her career and her remarkable perspectives about composing and music.
Topics:
- How growing up in New York City with two very supportive parents helped Alex to a career in music.
- The importance of “showing up” and how it leads to amazing connections and opportunities.
- Her remarkable story about her transition from writing commercial music for media to becoming a concert composer and then how she got involved in writing for band.
- Her creative process and the story of how a glass of Scotch and the frustration of a late night led to the creation of her work Paper Cut.
Links:
- Alex Shapiro, Composer
- Resources for Programming Music
- Alex Shapiro: Paper Cut
- Alex Shapiro: Rock Music
- The Portfolio Composer Podcast
- Steven Pressfield: The War of Art
- Leonard Bernstein’s Harvard Lectures
- Johan Sebastian Bach: The Italian Concerto, Movement II
Biography:
Composer Alex Shapiro aligns note after note with the hope that at least a few of them will actually sound good next to each other. Her persistence at this activity, as well as non-fiction music writing, arts advocacy, public speaking, wildlife photography, and the shameless instigation of insufferable puns on Facebook, has led to a happy life. Drawing from a broad musical palette that giddily ignores genre, Alex's acoustic and electroacoustic works are published by Activist Music LLC, performed and broadcast daily, and can be found on nearly thirty commercial releases from record labels around the world.