Two University of Arizona School of Music alumni are giving back to the program that gave them their start.
Daryl Durran (BM ’78, bassoon) and Lois Durran (BM ’77, violin) have established the Daryl W. and Lois F. Durran Music Scholarship Endowment, a gift that will support undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Music for generations to come. It’s a decision rooted in their own full-tuition scholarships as students, decades of teaching and performing careers built on that foundation, and an origin story that explains how the two of them met in the first place.
Daryl and Lois grew up 40 miles apart in Southern California and never crossed paths there — it took their high school band directors, both University of Arizona alumni, independently pointing them toward the same music school in Tucson to bring them together.
“Our parents lived 40 miles apart, so we didn’t meet until we came to the U of A,” Lois said. “We were in all of our classes together.”
Daryl and Lois arrived as first-year students in the early 1970s on full-tuition scholarships. They shared theory classes with Dr. Ed Murphy, history with Dr. James Anthony, and orchestra with conductor Henry Johnson — teachers who, looking back, they’ve come to appreciate even more with time.
“He just had great enthusiasm for the subject matter, and it rubbed off,” Daryl said of Murphy. “He demanded excellence,” Lois added.
That standard followed them into the professional world almost immediately. As students, both played in the Tucson Symphony and Arizona Opera orchestras — real, paid, professional work alongside their own teachers.
“It was everything,” Lois said. “It allowed us to be financially independent. We had tuition waivers, but it let us earn enough money to support ourselves.”
“It was fabulous, because I was sitting there, playing next to my teacher,” Daryl said. “Having that professional experience was extremely valuable when we went on to our next stop.”
Building Parallel Careers
After Tucson, the Durrans moved to Milwaukee, where Daryl earned a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Both performed with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra and other area ensembles through the late 1970s and early ’80s.
In 1983, Daryl joined the music faculty at Penn State, where he taught bassoon for 39 years before retiring in 2022. Lois built a private violin studio in State College that she maintained until 2021. Together with colleague Douglas Meyer, the couple founded the Pennsylvania Chamber Orchestra in 1990 — an orchestra now in its 37th season.
Looking back at the school that launched it all, Daryl sees a clear throughline to where he spent his career.
“It’s interesting — the School of Music at Penn State is rather like the School of Music at the University of Arizona,” he said. “A comprehensive school, specialist colleagues on all the instruments, full-time resident applied faculty. That’s a real strength of any music school, and it was a continuation of what we were used to. When I went on to graduate school, I found that I was well prepared for advanced studies. The U of A was a very effective launch pad for both of us.”
Giving Back
That gratitude is what led the Durrans to establish the Daryl W. and Lois F. Durran Music Scholarship Endowment, a gift that will support undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Music for generations to come.
“There’s a certain amount of gratitude and responsibility to continue that,” Lois said. “We know from a career at Penn State that there’s no way a lot of kids can afford college tuition. Scholarships are incredibly essential.”
“We’re deeply appreciative of the scholarships that we had,” Daryl said. “We know how important it is for the university to have those scholarships to recruit the best students. You can’t recruit the best students without a bunch of scholarships. It’s not possible. We’re in a position where we can give back, and we’re happy to be doing that.”
The couple see the gift as an investment in students they’ll never meet but whose success they’ll help make possible.
“Ideally, they would be able to have a career in music,” Lois said. “A lot of my former students are working in other fields, but they still play. We want to enable people who are serious.”
“We want to help people achieve their passion,” Daryl said. “You could be a plumber or you could be a bassoonist — if you don’t have a passion for it, it’s not going to work. Give students a chance to realize their dreams.”
“Because we did,” Lois said.
Life in Retirement
Retirement looks different for each of them. Daryl still practices and has kept busy with music publishing and editing. Lois sold her violin and shifted to visual art, quilting and making other non-representational art.
But music, and the University of Arizona, remain close to both of them.
“The university was a really important place for both of us, and we are grateful,” Lois said. “Without that, we wouldn’t have been able to do what we were able to do. And it is important to give back. We don’t have children of our own, so we’re going to help somebody else’s kids.”
Daryl put it in terms only a lifelong teacher would.
“There’s this spiral through time — students and their teachers. It’s really powerful, and that’s what we do,” he said. “We both experienced that from both ends. We had great teachers, and we became teachers, and hopefully we’ve done the same for our students.”