Daniel Gardner
Composition
Office: TC 427
Email: dgardne6@uwo.ca
Daniel Gardner (he/him) is a composer, percussionist and educator from Belleville, ON. His work is concerned with how context shapes listening, exploring both how listeners' expectations of consonance and dissonance are relative to the musical context, and how space and place condition the perception of sound as art. Daniel's current work in composition is focused on developing electroacoustic music aimed at non-professional performers as a means of overcoming geographic barriers to performers and listeners accessing resource-intensive modes of music performance. He is currently working with Joel Cormier (principal percussionist of Symphony New Brunswick) to develop a new work for solo snare drum and electronics.
Daniel's compositions have been performed across Canada and internationally, including at the Tuckamore Festival (St. John's, NL), the Lunenberg Academy of Music Performance (Lunenburg, NS), the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (Montreal, QC), IndieFest (Vancouver, BC), and as part of Maureen Batt's Crossing Border's Tour (Halifax; NS, Pereira; Colombia). In 2023, Daniel's piece "Ambient Sound Flow" was included in the Center for Deep Listening's Year of Deep Listening and will be included in the printed collection of works published through Terra Nova Press (in press, 2024).
As an educator, Daniel has been a private drum instructor for more than ten years and has worked as a classroom teacher in the New Brunswick Anglophone East School District. His music education research has been presented at the Sound Meaning Education Conference (2023), the International Society of Music Educators (ISME) World Conference (2022) and is published in Oxford University Press's General Music (2023). He is working with a team including Dr. Jashen Edwards (University of Guelph) and Dr. Kari Veblen (Western University) on a project exploring inclusive approaches to collaborative composition in the classroom.
Daniel holds an MMus in composition from Western University (2020) and is an associate composer at the Canadian Music Center. He is currently a PhD student at Western University studying music composition with a collaborative specialization in music cognition.
