Your online guide to the music of David Jason Snow
The music of David Jason Snow has been performed in concert by the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the American Brass Quintet, the Harvard Wind Ensemble, the Yale University Band, the Eastman Percussion Ensemble, and numerous other ensembles throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. Snow has been the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, the ASCAP Foundation, BMI, Musician magazine and Keyboard magazine, and has been an artist resident at Yaddo and the Millay Colony for the Arts. He holds degrees in music composition from the Eastman School of Music and Yale University, where his principle teachers were Joseph Schwantner, Warren Benson, Samuel Adler and Jacob Druckman.
Purchase music
Sheet music to Winter for trumpet and piano is available for sale directly from the composer for $20.00 (U.S.) plus $4.00 shipping (continental U.S. only). Please specify Bb or C trumpet part; if you want both parts, add $4.00. Pay with personal check or via PayPal. Contact me to place an order or inquire about international shipping rates.
Recent News
July 29, 2009: The Kruse Duo (Penny Thompson Kruse, violin, and Steven Kruse, viola) performed "Jakarta" for violin, viola, and percussion ensemble at the 37th International Viola Congress, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, hosted by The Viola Society of South Africa.
May 22, 2008: "Three Studies for Two Disklaviers" was performed at the Music for Disklavier concert, Yamaha Artist Services Piano Salon, New York City.
October 31, 2007: Dr. Penny Thompson Kruse performed "A Night in Jakarta" for electric violin and recorded sound at Bowling Green State University.
July 29, 2006: The American Brass Quintet performed "Dance Movements" in recital at the Aspen Music Festival.
May 4, 2006: The American Brass Quintet performed "Dance Movements" at The Juilliard School as part of the Daniel Saidenberg Faculty Recital series.
April 13, 2006: The Central Michigan University Percussion Ensemble performed "Jakarta" under the direction of Andrew Spencer.
March 16, 2006: The musical quartet Pastiche performed "A Baker's Tale" in Ralph Squires Recital Hall at McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana, as part of the McNeese Spring Faculty-Guest Artist Series.
February 14, 2006: Tinglan Chen (violin), Andrew DeBoer (clarinet), Dan Schmidt (trumpet), Bruce Gbur (bassoon), Jonathan Sokasits (piano), and Debra McKim (narrator) performed "A Baker's Tale" in a Valentine's Day recital at Saint Marks Pro-Cathedral in Hastings, Nebraska.
October, 2005: After a 1-year stint as Media Coordinator at Vidipax, LLC in Long Island City, NY, David Snow was recently appointed music cataloger and archival processor at The Lila Acheson Wallace Library at The Juilliard School.
New from Albany Records:
Performed by Chris Gekker, trumpet.
By monitoring the brains of people listening to classical scales and key progressions, scientists at Dartmouth College glimpsed the biology of (musical perception). The flash-dance of these brain circuits, which process the harmonic relationship of musical notes, is shaped by a human craving for melody that drives people to spend more every year on music than on prescription drugs...
"Music is not necessary for human survival, yet something inside us craves it," said Dartmouth psychologist Petr Janata, who let the international research team. "Our minds have internalized the music"...
Among expert musicians, certain areas of the cortex are as much as 5 percent larger than in people with little or no musical training, recent research shows. In musicans who started their training in early childhood, the neural bridge that links the brain's hemispheres, called the corpus callosum, is as much as 15 percent larger. A professional musician's auditory cortex -- the part of the brain associated with hearing -- contains 130 percent more gray matter than that of nonmusicians.
The new study... shows for the first time that the abstract knowledge about the harmonic relationships in music inscribes itself on the human cortex, guiding expectations of how musical notes should relate to one another as they are played. Through constant exposure, synapses are trained to respond like a series of tuning forks to the tones characteristic of Western music, several experts said.
The pattern in the music literally becomes a pattern in the brain.
"It shows this link between music theory and perception and brain function," said Frances H. Rauscher, an expert in music cognition at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. "No one had looked before."
-Robert Lee Hotz, The Washington Post, December 13, 2002
Anne J. Blood and Robert J. Zatorre of McGill University in Montreal conducted brain scans on five female and five male students with at least eight years of musical training while they listened to selections of classical music they especially liked. Parts of the brain known to be involved pleasure, emotion and arousal became activated when the subjects experienced "chills," the the researchers reported in the Sept. 25 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "This is quite remarkable, because music is neither strictly necessary for biological survival or reproduction, nor is it a pharmacological substance," the researchers wrote. "The ability of music to induce such pleasure and its putative stimulation of endogenous reward systems suggest that, although music may not be imperative for survival of the human species, it may indeed be of significant benefit to our mental and physical well being."
-Washington Post, October 1, 2001
The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult sufferage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, evolution theory, sex...
What are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the above list -- yes, even the short skirts and dancing -- are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
-Salman Rushdie, October 2, 2001
E-Mail:djsnow1054@gmail.com
Copyright © 2009 David Jason Snow
Updated September 11, 2009