Composer Gifts
We have new composer gifts and plenty of other music gifts. But mainly, this blog will introduce you to one of our new composer judges. Since, I couldn’t find his music by googling it, I asked him for some recordings, and his music is delightful! I hope you will enjoy it also. Of course, purchasing gifts from this site helps to support the MusicTeacherGifts.com youth music composition competition.
Click on picture to link to shopping.
Music Mug with Becky’s Signature Art comes in two sizes.
Composer Travel Mug with Becky’s Signature Art. To request your choice of word, send personalization request to Becky@MusicTeacherGifts.com
Composer Tees are unisex, and writing can be on the front or the back. To personalize writing, or and Tee style such as V-neck or long sleeves, send email.
Elegant Black Composer Mug with Gold Text - two sizes.
Composer Donald Sloan Biography -
Donald Sloan will be judging in the 2024 Youth Music Composition Competition, so I would like to make an introduction.
Donald Sloan is an award-winning composer of chamber, vocal, and orchestral works. His music has been performed and recorded in the United States and abroad. He is currently coordinator of the composition and music theory area at Coastal Carolina University. His previous positions were at Ashland University in Ohio, and Binghamton University in New York.
Sloan was born in Bethpage, New York in 1956. He studied horn as well as classical guitar. He got his undergraduate education at Cornell University, studying with Karel Husa. Sloan was among the last cohort of American composers to be invited to study with Nadia Boulanger in France shortly before she passed away in 1979. He stayed on to work with her assistant Annette Dieudonné and had further compositional studies with Henri Dutilleux. Sloan returned to the US to get his Masters degree at University of Michigan, studying with William Albright, followed by his PhD at the Eastman School of Music, studying with Warren Benson and Samuel Adler. He subsequently earned a Master of Science in Advanced Technology at Binghamton University in Systems Science. He was part of a group that developed advances in the computer representation of musical information in the 1980s and 1990s.
Sloan’s musical influences come from a variety of styles, incorporating elements of modernism, jazz, extended tonality, Jewish music, and other diverse elements. His most performed work, Five Flights of Fancy for flute and clarinet, blends extended techniques with neo-tonal elements. He has incorporated traditional Jewish cantorial chanting and klezmer styles into his chamber works Or Zarua for clarinet, violin and piano, and Four Jewish Moods for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. He has been commissioned twice by the Long Bay Symphony, creating …the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind and more recently, Red Sky At Morning. He has several chamber works that use melodies from various jazz bebop artists like Eric Dolphy and Dizzy Gillespie, including Dolphic Variations, Tributaries, and Ruminations. His music is self-published and is available on request at dsloan@coastal.edu.
In addition to his musical work, Sloan has been active in Jewish life in general and Holocaust education and commemoration, having been a member of the South Carolina Council on the Holocaust from 2018-2023. He has given public talks on Jewish History as well as his own experiences as the son of a Holocaust survivor. Sloan is has been a lay leader at several synagogues, both in leading services and blowing the shofar during the High Holidays.
In a lighter vein, Sloan is a trivia expert, having been a three-time champion on Jeopardy! In 1996. He currently lives in Hendersonville, NC with his wife, Renée Jackson and his dog Rossi, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever.
