COMPOSERS
Round Top Concert - May 10th
JohanN STRAUSS II
Johann Strauss, Jr. (25 October 1825, Vienna, Austria – 3 June 1899, Vienna, Austria) was an Austrian composer and conductor.
Strauss the younger was not permitted by his father, the well-known Johann Strauss Sr., to study music, and after receiving a basic general education, he became a bank clerk. His mother, however, had him take music lessons in secret, and after the parents separated, Johann took up the study of the violin and theory in earnest. At the age of 19, he formed an orchestra and presented concerts that soon began to rival those of his more famous father.
Nineteenth-century Vienna, a wealthy, self-indulgent, and sensous city, was ready for music by the Strausses. A saying by Charles Joseph, Prince of Ligne, concerning the socially minded Congress of Vienna (1814-1815), “It dances but never gets anything done,” was at least partly true. The music of the Strauss family is still heard in cities around the world.
Johann the younger became known as the Waltz King as a result of his numerous and popular waltz compositions. The best known of these include Artist’s Life; Tales from the Vienna Woods; Wine, Women, and Song; and The Blue Danube. In his later years he wrote operettas, the best known being Die Fledermaus.
KEITH FICKEL
Keith Fickel has held multiple roles in education over the last 34 years. His career started as a middle school band director and ended as a high school principal. He earned a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Texas Tech University in 1991, and he completed his Master of Music Education degree, also from Texas Tech, in 1997. Starting first as a band director at Trinity Christian School in Lubbock, Texas in 1991, he came to Fort Bend ISD in 1993 to work as an assistant band director at Lake Olympia Middle School with Nancy Caston. In 1996 he moved over to neighboring Quail Valley Middle School to be the assistant band director with Greg Countryman, where in 2000 the band was named as the CCC Honor Band. The QVMS band was invited to perform at the Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic in December 2000. In 2001, Mr. Fickel moved to the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD to be the head director at Labay Middle School. He returned to Fort Bend ISD and to Lake Olympia MS in 2004, and then opened Baines Middle School in 2006, where he also started the school’s string orchestra program and served as the Fine Arts Department Chair. In 2008, he was named the Baines Middle School Teacher of the Year, and he was named as a finalist for the FBISD Secondary Teacher of the Year.
In the fall of 2008, Mr. Fickel shifted from the band hall to the administrative team, serving as assistant and associate principal at Baines Middle School, then in 2015 served as assistant principal at Willowridge High School. In 2016, Mr. Fickel was named principal of Sugar Land Middle School, where he was named the Fort Bend ISD Secondary Principal of the Year in 2022. He had the honor of opening the district’s newest high school, Almeta Crawford High School, in August of 2023, as its founding principal, and he retired from education in June 2024.
He lives in Sugar Land with his wife, Anne. They have one child, a daughter named Laura, who is an instructional designer for San Jacinto College. Both Anne and Laura are performing members of the Sugar Land Winds.
JOHN WILLIAMS
In a career that spans five decades, John Williams has become one of America’s most accomplished and successful composers for film and for the concert stage. He has served as music director and laureate conductor of one of the country’s treasured musical institutions, the Boston Pops Orchestra, and he maintains thriving artistic relationships with many of the world’s great orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Mr. Williams has received a variety of prestigious awards, including the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Olympic Order, and numerous Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Emmy Awards and Golden Globe Awards. He remains one of our nation’s most distinguished and contributive musical voices.
Mr. Williams has composed the music and served as music director for more than one hundred films. His 40-year artistic partnership with director Steven Spielberg has resulted in many of Hollywood’s most acclaimed and successful films, including Schindler’s List, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, four Indiana Jones films, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Munich, Hook, Catch Me If You Can, Minority Report, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Empire of the Sun, The Adventures of TinTin and War Horse. Their latest collaboration, The BFG, was released on July 1, 2016. Mr. Williams has composed the scores for all seven Star Wars films, the first three Harry Potter films, Superman: The Movie, JFK, Born on the Fourth of July, Memoirs of a Geisha, Far and Away, The Accidental Tourist, Home Alone, Nixon, The Patriot, Angela’s Ashes, Seven Years in Tibet, The Witches of Eastwick, Rosewood, Sleepers, Sabrina, Presumed Innocent, The Cowboys and The Reivers, among many others. He has worked with many legendary directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler and Robert Altman. In 1971, he adapted the score for the film version of Fiddler on the Roof, for which he composed original violin cadenzas for renowned virtuoso Isaac Stern. He has appeared on recordings as pianist and conductor with Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Jessye Norman and others. Mr. Williams has received five Academy Awards and 50 Oscar nominations, making him the Academy’s most-nominated living person and the second-most nominated person in the history of the Oscars. His most recent nomination was for the film Star War: The Force Awakens. He also has received seven British Academy Awards (BAFTA), 22 Grammys, four Golden Globes, five Emmys, and numerous gold and platinum records.
Born and raised in New York, Mr. Williams moved to Los Angeles with his family in 1948, where he studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. After service in the Air Force, he returned to New York to attend the Juilliard School, where he studied piano with Madame Rosina Lhevinne. While in New York, he also worked as a jazz pianist, both in nightclubs and on recordings. He returned to Los Angeles and began his career in the film industry, working with a number of accomplished composers including Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, and Franz Waxman. He went on to write music for more than 200 television episodes for anthology series Alcoa Premiere, Kraft Suspense Theatre, Chrysler Theatre and Playhouse 90. His more recent contributions to television music include the well-known theme for NBC Nightly News (“The Mission”), the theme for what has become network television’s longest-running series, NBC’s Meet the Press, and a new theme for the prestigious PBS arts showcase Great Performances.
In addition to his activity in film and television, Mr. Williams has composed numerous works for the concert stage, among them two symphonies, and concertos for flute, violin, clarinet, viola, oboe and tuba. His cello concerto was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered by Yo-Yo Ma at Tanglewood in 1994. Mr. Williams also has filled commissions by several of the world’s leading orchestras, including a bassoon concerto for the New York Philharmonic entitled The Five Sacred Trees, a trumpet concerto for the Cleveland Orchestra, and a horn concerto for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Seven for Luck, a seven-piece song cycle for soprano and orchestra based on the texts of former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, was premiered by the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in 1998. At the opening concert of their 2009–2010 season, James Levine led the Boston Symphony in the premiere Mr. Williams’ On Willows and Birches, a concerto for harp and orchestra.
In January 1980, Mr. Williams was named nineteenth music director of the Boston Pops Orchestra, succeeding the legendary Arthur Fiedler. He currently holds the title of Boston Pops Laureate Conductor which he assumed following his retirement in December 1993, after 14 highly successful seasons. He also holds the title of Artist-in-Residence at Tanglewood.
One of America’s best known and most distinctive artistic voices, Mr. Williams has composed music for many important cultural and commemorative events. Liberty Fanfare was composed for the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. American Journey, written to celebrate the new millennium and to accompany the retrospective film The Unfinished Journey by director Steven Spielberg, was premiered at the “America’s Millennium” concert in Washington, D.C. on New Year’s Eve, 1999. His orchestral work Soundings was performed at the celebratory opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. In the world of sport, he has contributed musical themes for the 1984, 1988, and 1996 Summer Olympic Games, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games, and the 1987 International Summer Games of the Special Olympics. In 2006, Mr. Williams composed the theme for NBC’s presentation of NFL Football.
Mr. Williams holds honorary degrees from 21 American universities, including The Juilliard School, Boston College, Northeastern University, Tufts University, Boston University, the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, The Eastman School of Music, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the University of Southern California. He is a recipient of the 2009 National Medal of Arts, the highest award given to artists by the United States Government. In 2003, he received the Olympic Order, the IOC’s highest honor, for his contributions to the Olympic movement. He served as the Grand Marshal of the 2004 Rose Parade in Pasadena, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honor in December of 2004. Mr. Williams was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, and in January of that same year he composed and arranged Air and Simple Gifts especially for the first inaugural ceremony of President Barack Obama.
DONALD HUNSBERGER
Donald Hunsberger’s attention to musical expression and detail long distinguished his approach to music of America’s past, as well as to music of today. From 1962 until his retirement in 2002, he served as professor of conducting and ensembles at Eastman. During his 37 years as conductor of the School’s acclaimed Eastman Wind Ensemble, Dr. Hunsberger premiered more than 100 compositions and maintained a repertory ranging from the 16th century through contemporary works by Schwantner, Colgrass, and Husa, among others. An international authority on wind band repertory and performance practices, Dr. Hunsberger conducted and lectured throughout Japan and Southeast Asia, England, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Norway, Belgium, and Israel. He led the Eastman Wind Ensemble in more than a dozen recordings, including a special, 3-CD box released by Warner Brothers Publications for the Wind Ensemble’s golden anniversary in February 2002. His work with Wynton Marsalis and the Ensemble is featured on Carnival, a CBS Masterworks recording which reached #1 on Billboard’s Classical CD Chart in 1987 and was nominated for a 1987 Grammy Award. The Sony Music Foundation, Inc. and Eastman Kodak Japan sponsored the Wind Ensemble, under Dr. Hunsberger’s direction, on seven extraordinarily successful tours of Japan. Dr. Hunsberger, who received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Eastman, conducted more than two hundred performances with more than 45 major symphony orchestras, including the National Symphony Orchestra, and the Houston, San Francisco, Utah, and Vancouver symphony orchestras, among others.
Professor Hunsberer joined the Eastman faculty in 1962. Professor Emeritus of Conducting and Ensembles, he died on November 5 2023.
STEPHEN BULLA
Stephen Bulla began his musical instruction at age 6, growing up in a musical household where his father played tuba and his mother played piano. He eventually graduated Magna Cum Laude from Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he studied trombone with Phil Wilson and Composition/Arranging with Herb Pomeroy.
In 1980 he won an audition for the position of Staff Arranger to "The President's Own" United States Marine Band and Chamber Orchestra in Washington DC. For the next thirty years, he would provide musical scores for a myriad of White House events, beginning with the Reagan era until 2010.
Working alongside film score legend John Williams he has transcribed music from "Star Wars," "Catch Me If You Can," and "Close Encounters" for performances by the Marine Band with the composer conducting. These arrangements are now published for wind band by Hal Leonard Corporation.
He has also scored music for the Discovery Channel (“Wings of the Luftwaffe” and “Century of Flight”) and PBS television series “In Performance At The White House”. On those occasions, his arrangements were performed by Sarah Vaughan, The Manhattan Transfer, Mel Torme, Doc Severinsen, Nell Carter, Shirley Jones, Larry Gatlin, and Jordan Sparks.
His commissioned concert works are performed and recorded internationally. The Dutch, British, Swiss and New Zealand Brass Band Championship organizations have all commissioned test pieces from his pen. He travels frequently as a guest Conductor and Adjudicator, and his published work for band and orchestra can be viewed at www.halleonard.com for further information.
PAUL LAVENDER
As Vice President of Instrumental Publications for Hal Leonard Corporation, Paul Lavender directs the product development and marketing of Hal Leonard’s extensive catalog of performance publications for orchestra, concert band, marching band, and jazz ensemble, as well as instrumental books, collections and methods.
Paul supervises the creative work of many of the industry’s most respected composers and arrangers, publishing over 600 new instrumental publications each year. His longtime association with renowned film composer John Williams has produced the prestigious John Williams Signature Series, featuring Williams’ authentic film scores and concert music for professional orchestras. In addition, Paul has served as music supervisor and arranger for several of Williams’ concerts and special events, including the 2003 and 2008 Marine Band Anniversary Concerts, the 2004 Rose Bowl, and the 2004 Kennedy Center Honors program (televised on CBS).
Also a prolific writer, Paul has contributed more than 1,200 arrangements and compositions to the educational and concert repertoire, and he continues to be one of the most widely played writers today. Most recently, he has received international acclaim with two notable transcriptions for symphonic band: Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky and Maurice Ravel. Both works were written for and recorded by the world-renowned United States Marine Band, and performed on national tours under the direction of Colonel Michael J. Colburn.
Paul is also co-author and managing editor of Essential Elements, the leading method for beginning bands and orchestras. Under his direction, Hal Leonard recently released Essential Elements Interactive, the first-ever, cloud-based resource that features online learning for school band and orchestra programs. His expertise in music notation and preparation, recording production, and computer system design contributes to Hal Leonard's continuing success as the leading print and digital music publisher, recognized throughout the world.
In 2005, Paul received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Central Michigan University, where he did both his undergraduate and graduate work in Music Theory and Composition. After serving as a graduate assistant teaching music theory at CMU, he furthered his music studies at the University of Michigan.
Paul and his wife Cheryl, an internationally recognized music educator and author of classroom resources, live in Brookfield, Wisconsin. They are the parents of three adult children, Eric, Brandon and Krista.
