The last concerts for the spring semester given by the Department of Music at the University of Rhode Island will be a special concert on May 10 featuring vocal and instrumental performances by URI alumni, faculty, and music honor students, and a free concert on May 12 by the URI Alumni Wind Ensemble. The May 10 concert, “Melodies Eternally New,” will include the Rhode Island premiere of selections from a song cycle composed by nationally noted economist Alfred Tella. Both concerts will be held in the URI Fine Arts Center Concert Hall, 105 Upper College Road, Kingston.

Admission for the “Melodies” concert at 7:30 p.m. on Friday evening is $10 general public, $5 students. Tickets will be available at the box office on a first-come basis starting 45 minutes before the concert. The ticket sales benefit music scholarships at the university.

A Rhode Island native, Tella has been a Georgetown University research professor, staff director of a presidential commission on poverty, a government adviser, and a prolific contributor for both print and Internet media on economic topics. He is also a pianist and composer, the critically acclaimed author of three fantasy fiction novels, and an expert on writer H. Rider Haggard. A 1955 graduate of URI, he majored in economics and business with a minor in music, and performed a recital of his own piano compositions in his senior year. The concert will feature three of Tella’s Song Offerings, a set of eight songs with lyrics adapted from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengalese writer and musician who was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Vocalists will include Georgette Hutchins, mezzo-soprano, James Malerich, tenor, and Kilian Mooney, tenor, all of South Kingstown; Erin Maughan, soprano, and Devon Morin, baritone, both of North Kingstown; Ryan Casperson of Cranston, tenor; Rebecca Cunha of Middletown, soprano; and Margaret Frazier of Carolina, soprano, who is both an alumna and URI faculty member.

Instrumentalists include Dalita Getzoian, flute, and Jonathan Audette, piano, both of Lincoln; Dylan LaGamma of Scarsdale, N.Y., jazz double bass; Charles Larson of Miller Place, N.Y., saxophone, and Christina Stavarkas of Medfield, Mass. and South Kingstown, viola.

The Alumni Wind Ensemble Concert, which starts at 3 p.m. on Sunday (Mother’s Day), is free. The program for that concert will include:Commando March by Samuel Barber, Huntingtower by Vittorio Respighi, Variations on a Shaker Melody by Aaron Copland, Sun Dance by Frank Ticheli, and Illyrian Dances by Guy Woolfenden. Dr. Brian Cardany will conduct.

The URI Concert Hall is handicap-accessible, and parking is available in the lot behind the Fine Arts Center, off Bills Road. For more information, please contact the URI Department of Music, 874-2431, or check the website www.uri.edu/

music.