Shockingly Modern Saxophone Festival

The annual Shockingly Modern Saxophone Festival returns to Augustana College, featuring solo and chamber music.

The festival will explore "the nearly unlimited sonic potential of the saxophone" through new composition, improvisation, extended performance techniques, microtonality, electronic music, multimedia, and other experimental elements.

Guest artists will include Susan Fancher and composer Mark Engebretson. The festival also will feature performances from faculty members John Cummins, Tony Oliver and Randall Hall, Elissa Kana of the University of Iowa, and members of the Augustana College Saxophone Studio.

The festival events are free and open to the public. Masks are required.

Schedule

Concert: 10 a.m. John Cummins and Elissa Kana with the Saxophone Studio.

Saxophone master class: 11 a.m., with Susan Fancher and Mark Engebretson.

Concert: 2:30 p.m., Randall Hall with Tony Oliver, percussion.

Guest artist Q&A: 3:30 p.m., with Susan Fancher and Mark Engebretson.

Concert: 7:30 p.m., with Susan Fancher and Mark Engebretson.

Fancher is a classical saxophonist known who has premiered more than 100 new compositions and continues to collaborate with composers. She has appeared in many of the world’s leading venues, including Sala São Paulo, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, Vienna’s Konzerthaus, Filharmonia Hall in Warsaw, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.

She teaches saxophone and coaches chamber music at Duke University. 

Engebretson is a professor of composition and electronic music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

He is the recipient of a Barlow Commission (for Bent Frequency), North Carolina Artist Fellowship in Composition (for the Concerto for Soprano Saxophone and Orchestra), a Fulbright Fellowship for studies in France, and has received major commissions from Harvard University’s Fromm Music Foundation, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Thomas S. Kenan Center for the Arts and the Barlow Foundation.