Jared Steward

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Winner of the Joan Derryberry Award concerto competition, percussionist Jared Steward performed Ney Rosauro's Concerto for Marimba and String Orchestra as a soloist with the Bryan Symphony Orchestra. He has performed in the percussion section with several orchestras including the Winston-Salem Symphony, St. Louis Philharmonic, Concord Orchestra, and the Nashua, York, Wellesley and New Bedford Symphony Orchestras. He was a member of the Bryan Symphony Orchestra for four years. Mr. Steward was percussion co-principal in the Rome Festival Orchestra in Rome, Italy which was where he met his wife, double-bassist Tonya Steward. As a freelance musician he has performed as a percussionist for several choral concerts and for the musicals Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Blood Brothers, and Children of Eden.

An avid performer of contemporary music, Mr. Steward founded the contemporary chamber group Just Seven which performed the works of John Cage, Stuart Saunders Smith, Barney Childs and others. He played the percussion part on the first performance of Robert Jager's I Dream of Peace and was a member of the historic Marimba Festival Orchestra in West Point, New York. A proponent of the snare drum as a solo instrument, Mr. Steward has performed Warren Benson's Three Dances for Solo Snare Drum in Tennessee, Massachusetts, and as part of the open-air Rome Festival where halfway through someone in a nearby apartment decided it should be a duet with a recording of James Brown.

Mr. Steward was a member of the drumming and dance ensemble ABUSUA for four years during which he danced and played the music of the Ewe and other peoples of West Africa. Concerts included performances with master drummers Abraham Kobina Adzenyah, the late Godwin Agbeli and a performance at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Nashville, TN.

His first instrument was the piano which is something he still enjoys playing occasionally. Mr. Steward also enjoys singing. He has sung with several choirs and was the conductor for a local church choir in Massachusetts for about a year. He has dabbled in composition, having studied with Robert Jager and completed two works during that time: next to of course god, america i for tenor and piano using text from the poem by e. e. cummings and the Rondo for Three Winds for flute, clarinet and bassoon. Currently, he is writing a new piece with text compiled by Caroline Bergvall using chance operations in order to compose the music.

While an undergraduate at Tennessee Technological University, Mr. Steward studied percussion with the late Joseph Rasmussen. He has also studied with John Kasica, Nanae Mimura, Harvey Price, Bill Wiggins and Christopher Norton. He has attended masterclasses by Bob Becker and as a member of the TTU percussion ensemble received coaching by Mr. Becker and other members of the percussion ensemble Nexus for a performance of Steve Reich's Drumming. He received the Master of Music degree in 2010 at University of North Carolina School of the Arts where he studied with John R. Beck.

As a private percussion instructor, he teaches at Separk Music in downtown Winston-Salem, NC and was on the Arts Cumberland faculty of TTU's extended education division during his last year at Tennessee Tech (1998-99). He also taught extensively as a marching band drumline coach and private teacher in the Middle Tennessee and greater Boston areas having taught elementary through high school students.

Mr. Steward is a past member of the national honor society Omicron Delta Kappa, served as chapter president of Collegiate Music Educators National Conference, and was student council president of the TTU Music and Art Department. He served for four years as a music librarian at TTU. He is a member of the Percussive Arts Society and an Eagle Boy Scout. Mr. Steward resides in Winston-Salem, NC with his wife Tonya, and two children Nicholas and Madeleine.