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May 2005: Scott Stewart

Conductor Scott Stewart Believes in Good Manners

On June 12, Scott A. Stewart, director of wind studies at Emory University, will conduct the Atlanta Youth Wind Symphony (AYWS) in a performance in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. Stewart has served as music director and conductor of the 80-member AYWS, which was founded in 1988 as the premiere honor wind ensemble for Atlanta metropolitan high school youth, since he joined the Emory faculty in 1999. The AYWS is sponsored by Emory University and performs four concerts annually on the Emory campus. Stewart is also musical director and conductor of the Emory Wind Ensemble and teaches courses in instrumental conducting and wind literature.

Throughout Stewart’s teaching career, he has held on to two beliefs: first, that the arts are indispensable to a good education and, second, that character education can be incorporated into music education. This latter belief is what led him to co-found Bend the Twig Inc., a nonprofit organization that promotes the integration of character education in music classrooms. In his work with Bend the Twig, he has appeared nationally at education and music conferences, presented in-services for teachers and administrators, and frequently written on topics of character and ethics in the performing arts.
We caught up with Stewart as he was planning his busy 2005-06 season to find out more about him and his work.

Q: Looking back on your life, can you see a clear-cut path leading to where you are now?
A: I actually started at Indiana University (IU) as a pre-med major. It took about a year of being around the music school and its teachers and students before I realized that I wanted to spend my life in music-making and teaching. As a saxophonist, wind band was the natural route to a music education career (they’re not used often in orchestras!), so I spent five years doing a Bachelor of Music Education at IU and then was employed in Austin, Texas, teaching middle school and high school band. While I was there, I did a master’s at the University of Texas at Austin and began to think about higher education as a possibility. After four years, I received a call from Indiana inviting me to return to do a doctorate in wind conducting, so I accepted and returned to Bloomington. After another four years of study, I received a call from my friend John Lynch, Director of Instrumental Music at Emory, indicating that he was leaving for a position at Northwestern University, and inquiring about whether or not I might be interested in being considered for the Emory job. This was in early August 1999, so Emory was anxious to have a person in place before school started!

Q: What can you tell us about your immediate future (plans, performances) and your not-so-immediate future?
A: The Emory music department is exploding with excitement and growth, and the wind studies program plans to ride the crest of that wave, if not play a significant leadership role in it. Music for winds and percussion is arguably the most abundant and artistically exciting of the new music in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Commissioning activities are popping up all over the place, and Emory has been a nationwide leader in engaging composers to compose new works for the wind ensemble medium. Since 1999, we have commissioned and premiered eight new works (costing around $75,000) and have five in the hopper for next year.

Because wind groups are not as well established and known as orchestras, it is important that the wind groups “get out of town.” The AYWS performed for the Georgia Music Educators Association in-service conference last January, played on From the Top (Public Radio International’s nationally-acclaimed radio show) the night before that, will perform in Carnegie Hall in June, and has just accepted an invitation to perform at the 2005 Midwest Clinic (an international band/orchestra conference of about 16,000 people) in Chicago this coming December.

The Emory Wind Ensemble has been on two European tours in the past three years—in 2003 to south Germany, Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Lucerne and in 2005 to Graz, Vienna, and Prague—as well as performing at and hosting the 2004 College Band Directors National Association/National Band Association Southern Division conference. Both groups are receiving significant regional and national exposure, and I would like this pattern of performances to continue.

Q: When and why did you start Bend the Twig?
A: Bend the Twig is a joint operation between me and my friend and colleague Dr. Laurie Scott, professor of music education and string pedagogy at the University of Texas at Austin. We taught together in Austin, and had numerous discussions, as all teachers do, about weak parenting skills, poor manners, disrespectful behavior, and the lot commonly experienced in public school teaching. We decided that we would implement in our music classrooms a system in which we not only taught, assessed, and evaluated musical behaviors, but also demonstrable behavioral characteristics that we felt contributed to a civil society and well-managed classroom. We did not teach this with any religious or moral view espoused by any denomination or sect, but rather as a set of general human values that were natural parts of a society of musicians who work together on a daily basis. The system worked, so we founded the nonprofit in 1995 and have given workshops and consulting jobs since then.

Q: Is there anything else you would like to say about yourself or your work with young musicians?
A: Just that I believe that arts education is crucial to all facets and all timelines of education. The cultural paranoia over test scores and supreme emphasis on math and science has left the visual and performing arts as ancillary to many curricula, when in fact I would argue that students in the arts are engaging in the most important of all human capacities—creativity, imagination, and expression. Being a small part of this honorable profession where one can spend the day making music and teaching terrific students about great art is a great privilege, and it certainly beats a desk job!

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