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FARMINGTON — The Emery Community Arts Center on the University of Maine at Farmington campus is featuring three exciting musical performance events this month. These will take place in the Emery Performance Space and are free and open to the public.

Wednesday, March 8, at 7 p.m. Roger Zahab and Aaron Wyanski, “Being Slowly Nowhere: Music of the New York School.” Visiting artist Roger Zahab joins UMF professor Aaron Wyanski for a concert of violin and piano music featuring works by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Visiting artist Roger Zahab joins UMF professor Aaron Wyanski for a concert of violin and piano music featuring works by John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Wyanski is a composer, pianist, and educator whose work explores memory, perspective and vulnerability. His music has been commissioned by the Amaranth String Quartet, Roger Zahab, percussionist Michael Jones, among others, and he has been an artist-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

An active educator, Wyanski is assistant professor of music composition at the University of Maine Farmington, and previously taught at The Hartt School (University of Hartford) and Sweet Briar College. He holds a DMA in composition from The Hartt School, an MFA from The Vermont College of Fine Arts and a BM in jazz studies from Purchase College (SUNY).

Zahab enjoys instigating fairly complex and unpredictable interactions through his activities as composer, violinist/violist, improvisor, conductor, teacher and writer. He has fostered premieres of more than 200 works and his repertoire spans some 700 years – from Guillaume de Machaut to the present. His work as composer and improvisor is primarily focused on music’s place in society at large. Recent activities include conducting Daron Hagen’s film opera “Orson Rehearsed,” editing primary and revised versions of Julia Perry’s Concerto for violin which he also gave the world premiere of in February 2022, composing the flute concerto wild woods for Lindsey Goodman, and the role of Strolling Violinist/Charon in Daron Hagen’s film opera “9/10 Love before the Fall.”

He teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is teaching professor, director of the orchestra, and director of undergraduate studies, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is founding core faculty member of the Master of Fine Arts in Music Composition program and currently co chair of the program.

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