Composer Nicole Piunno joins me to tell her remarkable story of resiliency, to describe her career as a composer and trumpet player, and to share her thoughts about music and the band community.

Topics:

• Nicole's background and the remarkable string of events that forced her to reinvent herself several times in her musical career.
• The injury to her trumpet embouchure that required surgery and how that injury and a comment from a colleague launched her career as a composer.
• Meeting David Gillingham and how he invited her to study with him at Central Michigan University.
• Thoughts about being a self-published composer and advice for young composers.

Links:

• Nicole Piunno, composer
• David Gillingham: Be Thou My Vision
• Nicole Piunno: Beauty Broken
• Aaron Copland: Appalachian Spring

Biography:

Nicole Piunno (b. 1985) is a composer who views music as a vehicle for seeing and experiencing the realities of life. Her music often reflects the paradoxes in life and how these seemingly opposites are connected as they often weave together. Her harmonic language and use of counterpoint mirrors the complexity of our world by acknowledging lightness and darkness, past and present, beauty and brokenness, confinement and freedom, chaos and order, spiritual and physical, life and death. 

Nicole holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition and a Master of Music degree in theory pedagogy at Michigan State University. Her composition teachers were Ricardo Lorenz and Charles Ruggiero. She earned a Master of Music degree in composition at Central Michigan University, studying with David Gillingham. She has also worked with Jason Bahr, David Ludwig, and Tony Zilincik. Nicole earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Education from Ohio Wesleyan University, where her emphasis was on trumpet. She has performed with the Central Ohio Symphony Orchestra and appeared as a soloist with the Ohio Wesleyan University Chamber Orchestra. Her music has recently been performed by the Principal Brass Quintet of the New York Philharmonic, Athena Brass Band, University of Akron Faculty Brass Quintet, and the Michigan State University Symphony Band. Her music has also been performed at the Orvieto Musica TrumpetFest in Orvieto, Italy, the OWU/NOW Festival of New Music, the Women in Music-Columbus concert, the SCI Student National Conference, and multiple International Trumpet Guild Conferences.