Dominic Talanca

Associate Professor of Music - Director of Bands

SFA 120A

Dominic Talanca has served as the Director of Bands at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for the past 8 years. During his time there, Dr. Talanca engaged with various ensembles of all ages. He was the artistic director and conductor of the Wilmington Symphonic Winds – an ensemble that has twice performed at the North Carolina Music Educators Association Conference. Talanca is the conductor of the Wilmington Symphony Pops Orchestra and has worked with multiple intergenerational community ensembles, including the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s New Horizons Band and the UNCW Summer Concert Band.

 

Dominic Talanca has enjoyed numerous opportunities for professional collaboration in recent years. Some meaningful engagements include invitations to conduct productions of Considering Matthew Shepard with Wilmington Voices and Man of La Mancha with Opera House Theatre Company. Dr. Talanca co-founded Southern Harmonie – a professional chamber ensemble of winds, percussion, and strings. Talanca has also traveled to Costa Rica for a week-long residence & performance with the Banda de Conciertos de San José.

 

Over the past 8 years, Dr. Talanca has worked with hundreds of secondary schools through clinic and adjudication activities. He has also served as the conductor for dozens of honor bands throughout the US and abroad. In the spring of this year, Dominic Talanca traveled to Frankfurt, Germany to conduct the Association for Music in International Schools (AMIS) European High School Honor Band. Dr. Talanca is excited to meet and connect with teachers and students throughout Arkansas and the surrounding states!

 

Talanca received his Bachelor of Music Education and Master of Music in Wind Conducting degrees from the University of North Texas, where he studied conducting with Eugene Migliaro Corporon. He received his Doctor of Musical Arts in Wind Conducting degree at Northwestern University, where he studied with Mallory Thompson. Prior to his graduate studies, Dr. Talanca taught middle school and high school for ten years in the Lewisville Independent School District in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and served as the Associate Director of Bands at Marcus High School in Flower Mound, Texas from 2006–2013.

 

Dominic Talanca is co-author of a beginning band method, Musical Mastery, published by MRNS Music. The text is used in 150+ school districts (over 400 schools) across the country and internationally, e.g., Japan and Oman – impacting over 100,000 students to date. Several universities have also adopted the book as the primary text for their instrumental methods classes. Additionally, Dr. Talanca has contributed three chapters to GIA Publication’s Teaching Music Through Performance in Band series, published journal articles for music education journals in North Carolina, Utah, and Arkansas, and an article in the WASBE Journal. He has presented multiple times at The Midwest Clinic International Band and Orchestra Conference in Chicago and other music education conferences in several states.

 

Before moving to Arkansas later this summer, Dr. Talanca is excited to conduct a Fourth of July Celebration and JAWS in Concert with the Wilmington Symphony Pops Orchestra in addition to spending two weeks working with the Young Artists Wind Ensemble at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute in a shared performance with Mallory Thompson.