Dr. Jeffrey Snedekerhas taught in the Music Department of Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, since 1991. His duties have included teaching horn, music history, and brass literature and pedagogy, performing with the CWU Faculty Wind Quintet and the CWU Faculty Brass Quintet, and directing the CWU Brass Choir and CWU Horn Ensemble. The CWUHE maintains an active outreach program for public schools, and has been an invited performing ensemble at numerous horn and music educator conferences, including the 28th (Eugene, OR), 30th(Banff), 33rd(Kalamazoo, MI), 40th(Denver), 43rd(San Francisco), 47th(Los Angeles), and 50th(Muncie, IN) international workshops of the International Horn Society. Dr. Snedeker has served as Interim Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, Associate Chair of the Music Department, and Chair of CWU’s Faculty Senate, as well as on numerous department, college, and university committees. He has received recognition for his teaching, scholarship, and service, including 2006 CWU Faculty Member of the Year, 2008 CWU Phi Kappa Phi Scholar of the Year, 2012 Washington Music Educators Association Higher Education Music Educator of the Year, 2012 CWU Distinguished University Faculty for Service, 2014 Washington State Representative Timm Ormsby Faculty Citizenship Award, and the 2014 National Phi Kappa Phi Artist Award. In 2018, Dr. Snedeker was inducted into the WMEA Hall of Fame.
Jeff is active in several national and international organizations, serving on the Board of Directors of the Historic Brass Society, the Washington Music Educators Association Advisory Board (elected to two terms as Higher Education Curriculum Officer), and the Advisory Council of the International Horn Society. He was elected President of IHS in 2006, re-elected in 2008 and again in 2016, and has served the society in many other capacities, including as Publications Editor (1998-2003) and Book and Music Reviews Editor (2003-2016).
As a performer, Jeff has received a number of honors, most notably First Place in the Natural Horn Division of the 1991 American Horn Competition. Jeff currently serves as Principal Horn with the Yakima Symphony. Jeff has been a featured artist, clinician, lecturer, conductor, and host of regional, national, and international conferences on six continents for the International Horn Society, Historic Brass Society, Northwest Horn Society, Washington Music Educators Association, among others, and given concerto appearances, traditional recitals, natural horn performances, and jazz gigs all over the US, and in Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, Finland, Taiwan, South Africa, Australia, and Brazil. He has also organized and hosted a wide range of events, including early music, brass, and horn workshops. He has held positions and played extra horn with regional, metropolitan, and festival orchestras in Washington (including Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera), Oregon (including the Oregon Symphony), Utah (including the Utah Symphony Orchestra), Wisconsin, Ohio, New Mexico, Virginia, and Michigan. He has also performed with Early Music Vancouver and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra of Vancouver, BC, and the Seattle Classical Players, among other period-instrument groups. Jeff has also performed on film and video game scores with Seattlemusic, Seattle Film Institute, and others, including Mirror, Mirror, Underworld: Awakening, Worlds of Warcraft 6, and Arkham Origins.
Jeff has published over 50 articles on a variety of musical topics in scholarly and popular journals, including seven entries in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary. With pianist Marilyn Wilbanks, Jeff released his first solo recording in 1996, Musique de Salon: 19th-Century French Music for horn and piano, which includes music for natural and early valved horns with fortepiano, and has received much critical acclaim. A second successful recording devoted to jazz, First Times, was released in 1998, and features the horn in settings ranging from horn/bass duo to fronting a big band. His third and fourth solo recordings were released in 2010—The Contemporary Natural Horn, the first ever CD devoted to this literature, and a second jazz CD Minor Returns: Tributes to the Horn in Jazz. His most recent recording, Twelve Etudes for Second Horn, op. 57, by Jacques-François Gallay, is the first-ever “side-by-side” recording, featuring these etudes on both the natural horn and the modern valved horn, serving as a unique pedagogical and artistic resource. All of his recordings have received very favorable reviews, and are available on Amazon.com and iTunes. Jeff has also been featured on recordings of the works of Douglas Hill and Lowell Shaw.
Jeff completed a BA in music and mathematics at Heidelberg College (1980), a Master of Music in horn performance at the University of Michigan (1981), a Master of Arts in music history at The Ohio State University (1985), and a Doctor of Musical Arts in horn performance and historical musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1991). He lives in Ellensburg, Washington, with his extremely patient wife and two talented sons.
 |