FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Cindy Deppe, media relations, 641-269-4834

June 10, 2008

WORK BY GRINNELL COLLEGE COMPOSER ON IOWA PUBLIC RADIO

GRINNELL, IA. - Works by five Iowa composers, including Grinnell College musician Jon Chenette, will broadcast on Iowa Public Radio’s "Symphonies of Iowa" series in June. The works were performed and recorded in May by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra and will be broadcast on WOI (90.1), KSUI (91.7), and KHKI (89.5) on Mon., June 16 at 8 p.m. and rebroadcast on Sat., June 21 at 10 a.m.

Chenette’s composition, "Oh Millersville!," involves settings of five whimsical poems by Grinnell College graduate James Norman Hall, author of"Mutiny on the Bounty." Hall wrote a larger set of 58 poems under the title "Oh Millersville!" late in life, reflecting back on his childhood in Colfax, Iowa. Hall took the pen name and persona of a 12-year-old Iowa school girl, Fern Gravel, and published the poems as a literary hoax in 1941. Chenette set some of the poems to music with piano accompaniment in 1990 and later arranged a smaller set for orchestral accompaniment, commissioned by the Dubuque Symphony Orchestra.

For more information about the composer series, go to http://www.iowapublicradio.org/soi2008.php

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