Eric Ewazen was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His composition teachers at the Eastman and Juilliard Schools and at Tanglewood have included Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller and Joseph Schwantner. He is currently on the faculty of The Juilliard School and has been lecturer for the New York Philharmonic Musical Encounters Program since 1992. He has been Composer-in-Residence with St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble in New York. About his wonderful piece Shadowcatcher he writes: "Edward Curtis, the great American photographer, who traveled throughout the American West during the early decades of the 20th century, took literally tens of thousands of photographs of native American Indians. He chronicled their ancient lifestyle - capturing a time and place destined to disappear in the face of the modern age. His mysterious, beautiful and powerful photographs had a distinctive play of light and dark, and the Indians dubbed him the "Shadowcatcher." Four of his photographs are the inspiration for this concerto for Brass Quintet and Wind Ensemble." Mel Powell's Capriccio for Concert Band was written in 1950 and premiered the same year by the Goldman Band in New York. It occupies the stylistic middle ground of Powell's first attempts to leave his jazz origins behind. It displays none of the compositional "difficulties" of the later-period Powell so often mentioned in the same breath with Babbitt and Carter. Hindemith and the neo-classical works of Stravinsky are more present in spirit here than any of the stripped down (in the Webernian sense) scores that he was to painstakingly produce from the sixties and the seventies