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Grant, Stewart
Stewart Grant. Conductor, composer, oboist, teacher, b Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ont, 30 Dec 1948; premier prix oboe (CMM) 1969, L MUS (McGill) 1969, B MUS (McGill) 1971. He began musical studies in Montreal where his teachers included Melvin Berman, Marvin Duchow, Bruce Mather, István Anhalt, and Kelsey Jones. He organized a chamber orchestra at 18 and later attended conducting workshops in Tanglewood, Mass, and Aspen, Colo, under Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Charles Jones, and at the University of Toronto with Victor Feldbrill.
Grant played oboe and english horn 1972-4 with the NACO, and was concurrently a member of the Ayorama Wind Quintet. The quintet's performance in 1973 of his Shiva's Dance renewed his interest in composition, which he studied privately 1976-8 with Gordon Delamont.
In 1978 Grant became the first full-time conductor and music director of the Lethbridge SO. He increased the number of performances, added contemporary works to the programming, and helped establish the Southern Alberta Chamber Orchestra (SACO). In 1988 Grant received the Heinz Unger Award for conductors. He has appeared as guest conductor with the Banff Festival Chamber Orchestra, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, the Kingston Symphony, the NYO, the Trois-Rivières Symphony Orchestra, and the Ball State U SO (Muncie, Ind), where he conducted an all-Canadian program as part of their 'Canada Year'.
Grant's compositions include Sam Black Sketches (1989) premiered by the Lethbridge SO, Dance Variations (1988) for piano, performed by Charles Foreman at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC, and Of Maids and Men (1985), Canadian folk song settings written for Maureen Forrester and the SACO. His Fantasia No. 2 for solo oboe d'amore was co-winner in 1982 of the ASCAP Award at the Aspen Music Festival, and A Band of Storytellers (1982) was premiered and commissioned by the Ayorama Wind Quintet.
Grant has been an oboe instructor at the Canadian Festival of Youth Orchestras at Banff (1984, 1986, 1988), and, beginning in 1978, at the University of Lethbridge. He has appeared with many chamber ensembles, among them the Lethbridge SO chamber group Musaeus (1981-), the Lethbridge Towne Musicians' Ensemble (1978-80), the St Andrew's Consort, (Toronto 1975-8), and the Ottawa Baroque Ensemble (1973-4). He is an associate of the Canadian Music Centre.
