Mid-South Horn Workshop 2012

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Brent Shires, D.M.A.  has been the horn professor at UCA since 1999. At UCA he teaches applied horn, high brass methods, and is the Brass Chamber Music Coordinator. He is a founding member of Pinnacle Brass, the resident quintet at UCA. Brent holds several other positions, including thrd horn with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, principal horn of the Conway Symphony and Pine Bluff Symphony, on-call hornist for the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and touring Broadway shows visiting Little Rock, and performing faculty member at Dixie Band Camp and Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp.

Dr. Shires earned his Bachelor of Music in Education from the Crane School of Music, S.U.N.Y. Potsdam; the Master of Music in Horn Performance and Pedagogy from Northern Illinois University; and the Doctor of Musical Arts in Horn Performance and Literature from the University of Illinois. His primary horn teachers include W. Peter Kurau, Roy Schaberg, John Fairfield, and Kazimierz Machala. He has also studied with Norman Schweikwert, Paul Navarro, and Timothy Jones. Brent's doctoral research area focused on original works for solo horn with wind band. He continues to develop this area of research, and is creating a resource for horn players and band directors at www.horn-and-band.info

Previous teaching positions include Silver Lake College, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and Millikin University, as well as Illinois public schools. Previous orchestral positions include principal horn with the Green Bay, Manitowoc, Champaign-Urbana, Danville, and Millikin-Decatur symphony orchestras; co-principal horn of Sinfonia da Camera; and third horn in the Peoria Symphony. He has also performed with Springfield, Elgin, Rockford, and Madison symphony orchestras, the Evansville Philharmonic and the Illinois Philharmonic. He has performed as guest principal of the Fujian Symphony Orchestra in Fuzhou, China; the East China Normal University Symphony Orchestra in Shanghai; and the Classical Music Festival in Eisenstadt, Austria. His favorite performance of record, however, was singing as a chorister with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle, on tour throughout England.

Brent serves the International Horn Society as the Arkansas Area Representative, and as Regional Workshop Coordinator. The Mid-South Horn Workshop 2012 marks his third time hosting a regional workshop of the IHS. He has attended nine international symposiums since 1988, and plans to perform and direct the UCA Horn Ensemble at the 2012 symposium at the University of North Texas. To visit his Arkansas Area IHS website, go to www.arkansashorn.org

The UCA Horn Studio includes music majors, music minors, and students majoring in other disciplines. The studio organized a UCA student organization, the UCA Horn Club, which successfully raises money and requests allocations from student government for the purpose of bringing in guest artists and travelling to workshops. Guests have included Gail Williams, Richard Todd, Eli Epstein, Richard King, Thomas Bacon, Kerry Turner and Kristina Mascher, and Audrey Good, to name a few. Performing as the UCA Horn Ensemble, students have had the honor to perform at three international symposia in the past decade, including 2004 in Valencia, Spain. The group has also travelled to regional workshops and events in Georgia, Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin.

For more information about the UCA Horn Studio, click here: UCA Horn Studio