The Sonoran Desert is a North American desert which covers large parts of the Southwestern United States in Arizona, California, Northwest Mexico in Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. It is one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America, with an area of 311,000 square kilometers (120,000 sq mi). The western portion of the United States-Mexico border passes through the Sonoran Desert.

In phytogeography, the Sonoran Desert is within the Sonoran Floristic Province of the Madrean Region in southwestern North America, part of the Holarctic Kingdom of the northern Western Hemisphere. The desert contains a variety of unique and endemic plants and animals, such as the Saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea) and Organ Pipe cactus (Stenocereus thurberi).

The Sonoran desert wraps around the northern end of the Gulf of California, from Baja California Sur (El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in central and Pacific west coast, Central Gulf Coast subregion on east to southern tip), north through much of Baja California, excluding the central northwest mountains and Pacific west coast, through southeastern California and southwestern and southern Arizona to western and central parts of Sonora.

Ron Nelson is a composer of both classical and popular music and a retired music academic.

A native of Joliet, Illinois, Ron Nelson was born December 14, 1929. He studied composition at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester earning a bachelor's degree in 1952, a master's degree in 1953, and a doctorate in composition in 1957. His teachers at Eastman included Louis Mennini, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. In 1954-1955 he studied with Tony Aubin in France at the Ecole Normale de Musique and at the Paris Conservatory under a Fulbright Grant. In 1956, Dr. Nelson joined the faculty of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where he served as chairman of the music department from 1963 to 1973, retiring as Professor Emeritus, in 1993.

In 1991, Dr. Nelson was awarded the Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts, the first musician to hold the chair. His Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H) was the first piece to win all three major wind band composition prizes during one period — the National Band Association Prize, the American Bandmasters Association Ostwald Award, and the Sudler International Prize. He was awarded the Medal of Honor by the John Philip Sousa Foundation in 1994. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oklahoma City University.

Eric Ewazen ( /ɪˈweɪzən/; born March 1, 1954, Cleveland, Ohio) is an American composer and teacher. Ewazen studied composition under Samuel Adler, Milton Babbitt, Gunther Schuller, Joseph Schwantner, Warren Benson, and Eugene Kurtz at the Eastman School of Music and The Juilliard School (where he received numerous composition awards, prizes, and fellowships). He has been on the faculty of The Juilliard School since 1980, and has been a lecturer for the New York Philharmonic's Musical Encounters Series. He has also served on the faculties of the Hebrew Arts School and the Lincoln Center Institute. He served as Vice President of the League of Composers - International Society of Contemporary Music from 1982–1989, and was also composer-in-residence for the Orchestra of St. Luke's.

Ewazen's compositions have been performed by numerous ensembles and orchestras around the world, such as the Cleveland Orchestra, and at festivals such as Woodstock, Tanglewood, Aspen, Caramoor, Tidewater, and the Music Academy of the West, among others. In recent years, he has increasingly written for brass instruments. Many of these works are performed regularly.