Bio

Daniel Gardner is a composer, teacher and percussionist based out of Moncton. As a composer, his music has been performed across Canada and internationally, being featured as part of the Tuckamore Festival (2019) in St. John’s NL, IndieFest (2021) in Vancouver BC and Maureen Batt’s Crossing Boarders Tour (2019). In 2022 his text score Ambient Sound Flow (2019) was featured in the Center for Deep Listening’s Year of Deep Listening. His music education research has been included as part of Oxford University Press’s General Music (2022) and he has presented his research at the International Society of Music Educators Conference. Daniel has a Bachelor of Music from Mount Allison University (2016), and a Master of Music Composition from Western University (2022).

Residency Project

As a teacher, I am committed to facilitating learning experiences that are engaging and valuable to students. I am very open to developing programs in concert with teachers that speak to the students’ conditions, interests and abilities. I am comfortable facilitating creative or research-based projects that engage with: western classical composition for acoustic instruments or electronics, songwriting, audio recording, post-production, Max/MSP, music history such as western classical (1500-present), jazz (1900-1980), and electronic music (1900-present), music theory (western classical, popular music), contemporary Canadian classical composers, the philosophy of art, percussion performance, nonstandard approaches to notation, or transcription. Example: Students will record a sound that they hear regularly and describe how that sound makes them feel. Students will then produce a graphical score representing that sound, and record themselves realizing that score with their instrument. By digitally manipulating only the original sound, the recorded realization of their graphical score, and one other sound of their choice, students will create a 1-2 minute track in BandLab that evokes the opposite feeling of their original sound (eg. a comforting sound will be used to create an unsettling track). Students will then write a 300-word reflection on the compositional process, this reflection might address: What were your expectations for the piece and how did the final result deviate from it? What was something you realized you didn’t know while creating this piece? What parts of your piece are successful? Unsuccessful? Why do you think that? What parts of this process will you take forward into future projects? Etc. I am comfortable delivering programs both in person and over teleconferencing software (such as zoom).

Teaching Experience

• I have taught private drum lessons since 2011; these lessons are directed by students’ interests and emphasize developing good practicing habits, and developing students’ capacity to engage in self-directed inquiry.
• In 2019, I co-facilitated a project in London ON called the “Sound Sculpture Park Project” that had a class of grade 8 students working in groups of 5-6 to collaboratively create compositions that the students rehearsed in the class-room and then presented a concert on a public “percussion sculpture”.
• In 2020, I co-facilitated a series of six, weekly, composition masterclasses in London ON for a class of grade 10 students, giving feedback on in-progress BandLab compositions.