Famed composer and teacher Augusta Read Thomas is serving as the McIlroy Family Visiting Professor in Performing and Visual Arts for 2010-2011 in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to working with students, she is composing an original piece exclusively for the University of Arkansas. The composition will premier on Friday, April 15 at the Walton Arts Center and will be performed by the University Symphony Orchestra and the internationally acclaimed vocal ensemble Schola Cantorum.

Second-grade students will be bused to the Walton Arts Center on the night of the premiere for a special interactive performance Thomas will conduct. She will also offer a talk at 1 p.m., April 11 at the Fayetteville Public Library.

Thomas’s teaching and composition are part of a year-long series of events at the university to honor the 60th anniversary of the Fine Arts Center, an integrated arts center designed by Edward Durrell Stone to bring together dance, music, art, drama and architecture under one roof. The concept was novel but simple: to create a space in which the various arts would interact and creatively flourish together.

Thomas was the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 through 2006. In 2007, her Astral Canticle was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Thomas has also been on the board of directors of the American Music Center since 2000, as well as on the boards and advisory boards of several chamber music groups. She was elected chair of the board of the American Music Center, a volunteer position she held from 2005 to 2008.

“It is rare for an orchestra to have the privilege of premiering a new work by Augusta Read Thomas,” said Lisa Margulis, associate professor of music in Fulbright College. “In 2011, those privileged ensembles include the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and the University of Arkansas Symphony at the Walton Arts Center. Our students are thrilled to partner with a composer of such stature, who is also renowned for her passion for engaging students as both a mentor and collaborator.”

In a Jan. 18, 2011 column for the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini writes that any list of important living composers would include many women, among them Augusta Read Thomas.

Thomas was an assistant, then associate professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music from 1993-2001, and from 2001 until 2006 was the Wyatt Professor of Music at Northwestern University. In the summers she often teaches at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she served as the Director of the Festival of Contemporary Music in 2009.

She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in May 2009. The honor of election is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

The citation, given at her induction, reads in part as follows:

“Augusta Read Thomas’s impressive body of works embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry. Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession. Later, as an influential teacher at Eastman, Northwestern and Tanglewood, chairperson of the American Music Center, and the Chicago Symphony's longest-serving resident composer, she has become one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American music.”

G. Schirmer Inc. is the exclusive publisher of Thomas’s music, and her discography includes 48 commercially recorded CDs. Visit Thomas’s website for a complete list of the recordings.

Thomas lives in, and divides her time between, Chicago and Becket, Mass.

In 2006, Hayden McIlroy Jr. (B.S.B.A. 1962) and Mary Joe McIlroy of Dallas committed $1 million to the establishment of the McIlroy Family Visiting Professorship in Performing and Visual Arts for the benefit of the Fulbright College and the Walton Arts Center. The McIlroys’ planned gift, committed during the Campaign for the Twenty-First Century, was matched by an additional $1 million from the University of Arkansas Matching Gift Program to support the endowed professorship. Over time, the total funding of the McIlroy Family Visiting Professorship in Performing and Visual Arts will be at least $2 million.

Thomas’s work composing the piece as well as time instructing students for its premier was primarily supported by the McIlroy endowment. The Women’s Giving Circle at the University of Arkansas has also contributed support toward her residency on campus.

To learn about other events scheduled throughout 2011 for the 60th anniversary celebrating the impact of the arts on campus and throughout the state and nation, visit this special anniversary website.