THE BLACKWELDER BRASS

The Blackwelder Brass, Oklahoma City University’s top graduate quintet, will travel to Europe early in 2007 for brass workshops and concerts in Kalavrita, Greece, followed by a performance in Athens.

The Blackwelder Brass is the newest ensemble at the Bass School of Music. The group was founded in 2004 with the arrival of Professor Michael Anderson, a member of the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and OCU’s director of brass studies. The group performs more than 50 times a year, exploring a varied and imaginative repertoire in recitals, sacred music, and formal ceremonies. Members also are featured soloists in several larger ensembles.

Click to watch video of Blackwelder Brass [93MB]

The musicians of the Blackwelder Brass boast a breadth of experience. In addition to Brandon McMillian (Dallas, Tex.), tuba, and Scott Brown (Harveyville, Kan.), trumpet, the group is comprised of trumpeter Ryan Sharp (Mustang, Okla.), who has spent four years touring with the Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus; his brother, trombonist Russell Sharp (Mustang, Okla.), who recently won a slot in the U.S. Navy Band; and Margerethe Davis (Las Vegas, Nev.), who has performed at the Houston Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and served as alternate in the New World Symphony.

The Blackwelder Brass is recording a new work to be featured on the web site of the International Trumpet Guild, and will be entering a recording in the upcoming Coleman Chamber Ensemble Competition after returning from the Greek event, to be held Jan. 2-9, 2007. In Greece, Professor Anderson will coach visiting brass groups and hold master classes while OCU students received individual and group critiques from international mentors.

Professor Anderson is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Trumpet Guild, executive director of the ITG web site (www.trumpetguild.org), and chairman of the ITG technology committee. He is a regular columnist for the ITG Journal and serves on the Editorial Committee as a peer reviewer of submitted articles.

In 2006, he headlined the Atlanta Trumpet Festival at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts of Emory University, opening the festival with a master clinic and, later that evening, performing a trumpet sonata written for him by composer Edward Knight, was featured at the 2006 ITG Conference, and was an artist and judge at the National Trumpet Competition, held March 16-20 at George Mason University in Washington, D.C.

ITG reviewer Neville Young called Anderson’s premiere of the work at the ITG Conference "a remarkable performance…moving seamlessly between impressive all-out trumpet sonata work and something verging dangerously close to musical comedy as the protagonists worked out their tensions across a seemingly smoldering piano."

In addition to his faculty appointment at OCU, Anderson is a trumpeter with the Oklahoma City Philharmonic and of the Board of Directors of the International Trumpet Guild. Anderson founded The Blackwelder Brass, the Bass School of Music’s graduate brass quintet.

He is an ITG Journal columnist and has presented and performed at several ITG Conferences. At the 2005 ITG Conference in Bangkok, he performed with the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra and as part of the Festival of Trumpets.

The Bass School of Music at Oklahoma City University is an All-Steinway School, an Apple Digital Campus, the nation’s first Conn-Selmer School, and winner of ASCAP’s national orchestral award for adventurous programming of contemporary music. The music school’s facilities more than doubled in 2006 with the opening of the $38.5 million, 113,000-square-foot Wanda L. Bass Music Center.

There are more than 200 public concerts on campus each year -- most of them free -- including performances by student ensembles, faculty members, and performances and master classes by guest artists.