Faculty Biography

Jonathan Jared Turner, Lecturer


Contact:
(585) 389-2700
jturner9@naz.edu

Departmental Responsibilities:
Composition
Electronic Music
Theory


Education:
Eastman School of Music, Ph.D
Florida State University, BM



Biography:
Dr. Turner joined the Nazareth faculty in 2002, teaching composition and electronic music, and maintaining the Electronic Music Studio and its equipment. Recent performances of Dr. Turner's compositions include "Ostinato Variations" performed in 2004 by Nazareth faculty members Kristin Shiner-McGuire (marimba), and Marjorie Roth (flute), and featuring Yamaha marimba artist Gifford Howarth. In a 2006 collaborative video-dance-music work, Dr. Turner contributed two compositions, "Fantasy for Two Pianos (Part 1)" and "Recursivity," for the ImageMovementSound Festival, multimedia works by faculty and student dancers, musicians, and video artists from several local colleges and universities, presented at both RIT and the Visual Arts Workshop.

Jonathan Jared Turner (b. 1946) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At Avonworth High School, he sang in the Concert Choir led by Thomas G. Monito, who mentored Turner's self-study of piano and guitar. At Florida State University, he studied composition with Harold Schiffman and John Boda. In the early 1970s, while working as a programmer at Yale University, he became interested in computer music, and audited classes with Robert Morris and Jacob Druckman.

Turner played tenor saxophone and composed for the Yale Jazz Ensemble, directed by Thomas Faye, whose members include Anthony Davis, Jane Ira Bloom, George Lewis, Frank Bennett, and David Mott. Turner occasionally performed with Leo Smith and David Amram. Turner accompanied dance classes for the Dance Alliance of New Haven, and contributed original music for their concerts as well. In 1976, the Wesleyan Woodwind Quintet commissioned and performed "Diadromosity," a three-movement suite combining a woodwind quintet and a jazz trio.

Through the late 1970s and early 1980s, Turner was multi-instrumentalist and arranger for the successful New Haven-based pop-music group 'Rhapsody.' But in the mid-80s, Turner left full-time performing, and worked for four years in a computer-game company, programming in FORTH and 6502 assembly language on early personal computers such as the Commodore 64, Apple II, and Atari 7800.

In 1987, Turner took up graduate musical studies at the Eastman School of Music, completing his composition Ph.D. in 1996. His dissertation advisers were Joseph Schwantner, for the orchestral work "First Symphony," and Robert Gauldin, for the musical structure of Paul Hindemith's "Lilacs" Requiem. One of Dr. Turner's ongoing research interests grew out of his study of Hindemith, namely, refinements of Hindemith's theory of harmony, which is based on quantifiable tonal properties of musical intervals.

Dr. Jon Turner is a fluent jazz and pop performer on flute, saxophone, guitar, and keyboard. He frequently performs an eclectic mix of pop, jazz, and classical arrangements, plus original works, accompanied by his own MIDI sequences.

Beginning in 1996, Dr. Turner supplied his live/electronic music for over 60 services at the First Unitarian Church in Rochester,NY. Dr. Turner was featured on saxophone with Jim Scott at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in Rochester in 1998. In 2000, he compiled an audio CD of recorded church performances, "Faith in Rhythm," to help fund a church program serving youth in several city public schools. As a member of the Unitarian Universalist Scouters Organization, Dr. Turner provided music for the Unitarian Universalist worship service at the 2005 National Scout Jamboree at Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia. Dr. Turner currently volunteers as a Cub Scout leader at Rochester's Martin B. Anderson School No. 1. Dr. Turner's family includes his wife Marie, a physician, and their teenage son and preteen daughter.

Personal Web-Page: www-pub.naz.edu:9000/~jturner9