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Trombone student hits high notes with two awards

April 6, 2010

KALAMAZOO--One year after winning an important national trombone competition, Western Michigan University music student Hana Beloglavec has two new honors to add to her rapidly growing list of accomplishments.

Beloglavec, a junior from Kalamazoo, Mich., and a member of the Lee Honors College, has received word that she has been chosen as a finalist in the 2010 International Trombone Association's Larry Wiehe Solo Competition. She now will compete for the top prize against two other finalists in early July in Texas.

But that's not all. Beloglavec was just notified that she has been accepted as a participant in the competitive 10th annual Bar Harbor Week, an intensive educational and performance experience for select college and high school brass musicians sponsored by the Mark Woolman Horner Music Education Fund and held in late June in Maine.

"These are simply two more recognitions in a long list of honors and awards for Hana," says her instructor, Dr. Stephen Wolfinbarger, WMU professor of music. "There are very few trombone students in the country who have had the success she has had in such high-level competitions, especially at the young age of 20. She's really establishing a name for herself."

Bar Harbor Week, June 20-26 at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, exposes participants to daily rehearsals, private lessons and coaching and master classes--all led by a prestigious faculty of many of the finest brass musicians and educators in the country. Bar Harbor is one of the East Coast's most popular summer tourist destinations and lies adjacent to Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island.

The Wiehe Competition will be held during the International Trombone Festival July 7-10 at the University of Texas in Austin. If Beloglavec wins, she'll receive a new King 3B tenor trombone worth several thousand dollars. She will also have the opportunity for an "encore performance" along with the winners of several other age categories later in the week.

These are the latest among Beloglavec's long list of accomplishments. In March 2009, the Slovenia-born Beloglavec won top honors in the U.S. Army Band's National Trombone Solo Competition, regarded as one of the two foremost competitions for young trombonists and held in Washington, D.C.

In May 2008, the Loy Norrix High School graduate was selected as one of nine nationwide finalists in the esteemed Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition. She also won the International Trombone Association's Gilberto Gagliardi Solo Competition for students 18 and under as an incoming freshman before beginning her studies at WMU.

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Media contact: Mark Schwerin, (269) 387-8400, mark.schwerin@wmich.edu

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