Guest artist Dennis Thurmond will present “400 Years of Keyboard Improvisation” on Tuesday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. The concert will be located in the Roland Hayes Concert Hall in the UTC Fine Arts Center (corner of Palmetto and Vine), and it is open to the general public and free of charge.

Dennis Thurmond, a native Tennessean, is the director of piano pedagogy and a specialist in Electronic Music. He was formerly the chairman of the music synthesis department and class piano program at the Berklee College of Music, and he was also a teaching fellow at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Professor Thurmond was on the summer faculty at the Utrecht Conservatory in the Netherlands, and he was on the master class faculty at Shanghai Conservatory.

Professor Thurmond is a classical and jazz pianist and a keyboard synthesist. His keyboard performances and technical background has included playing synthesizer for the Boston Pops, playing keyboards for the New York Vocal Jazz Ensemble, arranging for the Gospel Review for Symphony Orchestra with Della Reese and Billy Preston, being a studio pianist for the television series Party of Five, and designing ROM cards for Kawai in Japan. He is a composer and technical consultant for the Music Thru MIDI series and co-composer of the Jazz SophistiCat series, as well as Improvisation: the Systemic Approach for the Classical Pianist for Alfred Publishing Company. He was a student of Adele Marcus, and he often tours Asia, Europe and the United States.

Mr. Thurmond will present a unique evening of improvisation. He will solicit tunes from the audience and improvise on them based on the following themes: Renaissance, Baroque, Classic, Romantic, Impressionistic, French/Russian Neo-Romantic, and Jazz. It will be a one-of-a-kind concert that will be both interactive and entertaining, officials said.

For more information, contact the UTC Music Department at 425-4601 or visit http://utc.edu/music.