PRESENTER BIOS:

Marc Jensen is a composer, performer, and scholar who received a Ph.D. in music composition from the University of Minnesota. Much of his work is oriented around composing relationships rather than specific sounds: setting up situations in which performers follow simple sets of rules to interact and produce an unpredictably complex whole. Jensen holds a teaching certificate through the Deep Listening Institute and has edited several books on Deep Listening. He is the author/composer of Open Spaces: Environmental Listening and Sounding, and has published articles in several journals including Perspectives of New Music, Tempo, and Cinema Journal.

Samuel Magrill is a Professor of Music and Composer-in-Residence at UCO where he has taught music theory and composition since 1988. Previously, he taught at the University of Wyoming and California State University, Long Beach. He obtained his BM in Composition from Oberlin Conservatory and MM and DMA in Composition from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. His composition teachers have included Ramiro Cortes, Joseph Wood, Randolph Coleman, Ben Johnston, Edwin London, Herbert Brun and Kenneth Gaburo. Dr. Magrill has written more than one hundred compositions for a variety of instruments from solo piano and chamber music to choir, wind ensemble and symphony orchesta. His works have been performed throughout the U.S., abroad and many regional and national conferences. He has received numerous awards and commissions, including ones from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Music Center, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Illinois Arts Council, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), the Oklahoma Music Teacher’s Association, the American Composer’s Forum’s Continental Harmony Program and faculty research grants and merit credit awards from UCO. In Fall 1997, Dr. Magrill was chosen as the Hauptman Fellow for the UCO College of Liberal Arts. In Spring 2000, he was inducted into SAI as an Arts Associate and won the AAUP-UCO Distinguished Creativity Award.

Joseph Rivers is a concert and film composer and is Professor of Music and Film Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he teaches composition, film scoring and music theory. He recently completed the film socore to Bo Bergstrom’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a concert band piece commissioned by Mark Watson and the Friends of the Starlight Band of Tulsa entitled, Overture for Debbi. Nuova Avventura, a long-awaited CD of his compositions for piano, and with violin, clarinet, viola and cello, was released in 2010. He earned his degrees at the University of South Carolina (B.M. and M.M.), where he studied with Gordon Goodwin and Fred Teuber, and at the University of Arizona (Ph.D.), where he studied with Richard Faith and Edward Murphy.

Ricardo A. Coelho de Souza was born in Belém, Brazil. He is a visiting instructor in world music and percussion at the University of Oklahoma, where he also directs the OU Steel Band. Ricardo holds a performer’s certificate from the Carlos Gomes Conservatory, Bachelor and Master degrees from the University of Missouri, and a DMA from OU. Ricardo was a recipient of the BMI Student Composer Award in 1999 and at OU he received the Ronald J. Dyer Award in percussion, the Michael Hennagin Memorial Scholarship in composition, the Sutton Award in chamber music, and the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Award for meritorious scholarship and musical performance achievements. Ricardo has been featured at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention, the Texas Christian University Latin American Arts Festival, and The International Music Festival of Pará in Brazil. He has commissioned or premiered more than 30 works with percussion. Ricardo is actively engaged in composing and playing with orchestras, bands, chamber ensembles, popular music groups, and the Duo Avanzando with clarinetist David Carter.