Christopher Deane

From Wind Repertory Project
Christopher Deane

Biography

Christopher Deane (11 December 1957, Winston-Salem, N.C. - 9 October 2021, Denton, Tx.) was an American composer, educator and percussionist.

Christopher Deane was a professor of percussion at the University of North Texas College of Music teaching orchestral timpani, mallets, and directing the UNT Percussion Players percussion ensemble. He held performance degrees from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. He studied with James Massie Johnson, former principal timpanist of the St. Louis Symphony, and percussion with Allen Otte. He also studied independently with Roland Kohloff, N.Y. Philharmonic; Eugene Espino, Cincinnati Symphony; and Leonard Schulman, N.Y. City Opera.

Deane was principal percussionist with the Las Colinas Symphony Orchestra and acting principal timpanist of the East Texas Symphony Orchestra. He was a frequent performer with the Dallas Wind Symphony and appeared on five recordings with that ensemble. Deane was the principal timpanist of the Greensboro Symphony for nine years and performed with the North Carolina Symphony for ten years. He performed with numerous large ensembles including the Boston Pops, Cincinnati Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Ft. Worth Symphony, Minnesota Orchestra, Spoleto Festival Orchestra, Utah Symphony and Virginia Symphony working with conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, Loren Maazel, Andrew Litton, Jaap van Sweden, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and Keith Lockhart. His chamber music experience included performances with the Percussion Group Cincinnati, Aeolian Chamber Players, Mallarme Chamber Players and the Philidor Percussion Group. He appeared in more than seventy performances as a concerto soloist with either symphony orchestras or wind ensembles.

Deane was the faculty percussionist for the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival in Maine from 1982 to 1989. Over the course of those eight years he worked closely with composer George Crumb performing his music and serving as a consultant to Crumb for works including Idyll for the Misbegotten, Quest, and Haunted Landscapes. Deane served as a percussionist for the American Dance Festival from 1992 to 1996. He was also faculty percussionist for the Vale Veneto Music Festival in Brazil.

Deane won both first and second prize in the Percussion Arts Society Composition Competition. He studied composition with Sherwood Shaffer, Robert Ward, and Charles Fussell, and independently with Ben Johnston. He has received numerous commissions including the Percussive Arts Society, University of Oklahoma, and the University of Kentucky. His music has been performed and recorded internationally, and a number of his compositions have become standard literature on concerts and recitals worldwide.


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