Deep Roots: Paul Henning and the WSU Symphony Orchestra
About the event
All Paul Henning event information available at:
Nov. 6-9: Hollywood composer, studio musician, WSU alum, shares insights
The WSU Symphony Orchestra will perform Marche Militaire by Saint-Saens; Double Concerto for Oboe and Violin by J.S. Bach featuring School of Music faculty member soloists Keri McCarthy, oboe and Meredith Arksey, violin, with Jill Schneider, continuo; Russian Easter Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov; and the music of Paul Henning, including “Deep Roots.” Paul Henning (WSU ’98) will be returning to the Palouse to perform his own music with the WSU Symphony Orchestra. Join the WSU School of Music in celebrating the “deep roots” it has created at WSU and in the Palouse!
Alum Guest Artist:
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Henning enjoys a versatile music career in both film and live performance. Paul has composed the original music for the feature documentaries Foreman, Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of our Lives, and The Town That Was. He has worked on the score orchestrations for over 50 feature films, including Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The BFG, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb and Chocolat. In addition to his film writing, Paul also works on orchestral arrangements that have received performances by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and London Symphony.
He has helped create concert suites from the film scores, Spider-man, The Passion of the Christ, and Peter Pan, as well as multiple works from the catalogs of the Golden Age film composers Dimitri Tiomkin and Elmer Bernstein. Paul has also completed band arrangements for the Television Shows “American Idol,” “The Singing Bee,” and “Sunday’s Best.”
An accomplished pianist and violinist, Paul has performed with the Hollywood Studio Symphony on the soundtracks to Moana, Storks, Furious 7, Frozen, X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Maze Runner, Monsters University and Alice in Wonderland,, among many others. He has also played violin for Barbra Streisand, Michael Bublé, Neil Young, Aretha Franklin, Andrea Bocelli and Josh Groban. Paul has served as Concertmaster for the Golden State Pops Orchestra since 2004.
Paul grew up on his family’s 125-year old wheat farm near Pullman, Washington. He studied music at the University of Southern California and Washington State University.
Despite all his years of experience working in the Hollywood Studios and on the concert stage, Paul’s most exciting endeavor to date remains his solo piano & orchestra album, Breaking Through.
Faculty:
Dr. Meredith Arksey, violinist and violist, is an associate professor of Music at Washington State University in Pullman, where she is the coordinator of the string area and teaches studio violin and viola to undergraduate and graduate string majors. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin performance from the University of Michigan, where she was a student of Camilla Wicks and a string pedagogy graduate teaching assistant under Robert Culver. She received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Violin Performance from Michigan State University with I-Fu Wang. She performs frequently as a soloist and chamber musician and has been a featured soloist with the Coeur d’Alene Symphony Orchestra, the Alma Symphony Orchestra and the Washington-Idaho Symphony, as well as guest violinist and violist with the Spokane String Quartet.
Since 1989, Arksey has been the first violinist of the Silver Bay String Quartet, an ensemble that has a summer residency in New York State. She is also the violinist in Washington State University’s Palouse Trio. She is past-president of the Washington American String Teachers Association, and often serves as a presenter, clinician and adjudicator at conferences, competitions, master classes, and festivals throughout the United States. Before joining the faculty at WSU she was the artist-in-residence at Alma College, Alma Michigan, and spent her summers studying and performing at U.S. and European music festivals. She is currently on the board for Washington State ASTA and is an adjudicator for national ASTACAP and a contributor to STRAD Online Magazine.
Faculty
Keri E. McCarthy is Associate Professor of Oboe and Music History at Washington State University, and has cultivated an international reputation as a chamber musician, soloist, teacher, and clinician.
Dr. McCarthy has been active as a performer and researcher throughout Southeast Asia. She is a co-founder of the Pan Pacific Ensemble, a chamber ensemble committed to performing and commissioning music of contemporary composers from Asia and the United States. In 2013 she founded the Light through Music project with bassoonist Michael Garza, bringing double reed instruments and instruction to music centers in Myanmar and the Middle East. In spring 2014 she spent three months in Singapore, and gave concerts in Yangon (Myanmar), Bangkok (Thailand), Hanoi (Vietnam), and Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia). In 2011, she was a Fulbright Scholar in Bangkok, Thailand, researching connections between Thai traditional and contemporary musics, commissioning Thai and Malaysian composers, and performing new works with professional oboists in the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. She also completed a 2008 solo tour of Southeast Asia, performing commissioned works by composers from Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. She has premiered works by American and Southeast Asian composers at International Double Reed Society Conferences in 2006, 2007, 2010, 2014, and 2015, and was featured playing the Mozart Oboe Concerto with the Washington-Idaho Symphony in December 2011.
Keri currently performs in the Solstice Wind Quintet, the Pan-Pacific Ensemble, and in the Washington-Idaho and Yakima Symphony Orchestras. Previously-held oboe and English horn positions include the Salaya and Evansville Philharmonics and the Owensboro Symphony Orchestra. She has performed with the New Haven, Binghamton, Syracuse, Spokane and Louisville Symphonies, and the Nashville and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestras.
Dr. McCarthy completed her doctorate in Music Literature and Performance at Indiana University under the tutelage of Linda Strommen, Roger Roe, and Ted Baskin, having previously completed her Masters degree with Ronald Roseman at the Yale School of Music, and a Bachelors degree at Ithaca College, where she studied with Mark Hill and Paige Morgan.
The oboe studio at Washington State University includes a diverse group of musicians, including performance and music education majors, as well as music minors and non-majors. Reed-making and repertoire courses are offered each semester. Dr. McCarthy’s current and former students have won competitions, been featured as soloists with regional and national-level orchestras, and serve their communities as outstanding teachers, mentors, and musicians.