Professor of Music: St. Cloud State Bands
156 Performing Arts Center
rkhansen@stcloudstate.edu / (320) 308-3022
RICHARD K. HANSEN is Director of Bands and Professor of Music at St. Cloud State University, where he conducts the Wind Ensemble and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in conducting and musicology. Hansen has received both the Outstanding Teacher Award and the Outstanding Professional Achievement Award from SCSU. In addition, he has conducted university and honor bands in Denmark, Norway, Mexico, Japan, Russia and throughout the United States. In the fall of 2001, he conducted the Musashino Academia Musicae Wind Ensemble concluding with a concert in Tokyo’s prestigious Opera City Concert Hall. Hansen will return to Tokyo as a principal conductor of this Musashino group for the spring semester of 2007.
Professor Hansen has commissioned and conducted premieres of over thirty-five original and transcribed works for wind band including music of Ian Krouse, Libby Larsen, Giacomo Puccini and Richard Strauss. He has initiated and led several composer forums fostering new music, foremost the American Composers’ Forum “Nesting Project.’ Hansen has presented and published research on 19th and 20th century American wind band music for the World Association for Symphonic Bands and Ensembles (WASBE), Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic, the College Band Directors National Association (CBDNA), GIA Music Publications, International Society for the Research and Promotion of Wind Band Music (IGEB), Minnesota Music Educators Association (MMEA), and the Minnesota Band Directors Association (MBDA). In addition, Dr. Hansen wrote a foundational article on music and the related arts for Yamaha’s New Ways in Music Education. Professor Hansen is presently serving on the editorial board for the WASBE Journal and was inducted into the honorary American Bandmasters Association in March 2005.
Dr. Hansen completed advanced degrees in historical musicology and music education at the University of Minnesota. He presented his thesis, The American Wind Band: New Historical Perspectives at the 11th International Congress of WASBE in Jönköngping, Sweden in 2004, and is invited to the Oxford University Round Table of Scholars to present and discuss current issues in American music and culture in a weeklong colloqium in July 2007. Recently, GIA Publications of Chicago released Professor Hansen’s book entitled, The American Wind Band: A Cultural History. Leading authorities have described this comprehensive chronicle as “the breakthrough definitive history of the wind band.”
