John Lane
John Lane, DMA
Professor of Percussion,
Director of Percussion Studies
School of Music, 224 | 936.294.3593 | jwl002@shsu.edu | http://www.johnlane1.com
Division | Percussion
John Lane is an artist whose creative work and collaborations extend through percussion to poetry/spoken word and theater. As a performer, he has appeared on stages throughout the Americas, Australia, and Japan. Recent credits include solo and chamber music performances at the Rothko Chapel, Hokuto International Music Festival in Japan, Percusión en Escena International Percussion Festival in Bogotâ, Colombia, as concerto soloist with the National Symphony of Panama, and as a featured international guest artist at the Antarctica Music Festival at the Australian National University. He has released two albums: The Landscape Scrolls (Starkland Records), and Trigger: Artists Respond to Gun Violence (Albany Records).
Along with Allen Otte (Percussion Group Cincinnati), he created an ongoing social justice advocacy project, The Innocents which has toured throughout the US including performances and workshops at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, the Innocence Network Conference, numerous university and public school campuses, and is now the subject of an award winning feature length documentary by Wojciech Lorenc. Lungta, his trumpet/percussion duo with trumpeter Amanda Pepping, is dedicated to creating original works and a personal repertoire based largely on collaborations with artists of various disciplines.
Commissioning new works and interdisciplinary collaborations, often taking on socio-political issues, are integral to John's work. He has been connected with a number of composers including Peter Garland, Mark Applebaum, Yo Goto, Monica Pearce, Mark Satterwhite, Amanda Schoofs, Danny Clay, Graeme Leak, Emiliano Pardo, Mara Helmuth, Christopher Deane, John Luther Adams, Kyle Gann, Michael Byron, Wen Hui Xie, Kazuaki Shiota and David Farrell. John has collaborated extensively with poet Nick Lantz, the writers Ann McCutchan and Todd Boss, visual artists Edward Morin and Pat Alexander, and has created original music for choreographer/dancer Hilary Bryan and granite sculptor Jesús Moroles.
John has been active in the Percussive Arts Society, serving on the Composition Committee, the New Music/Research Committee and as a reviewer for Percussive Notes. John has performed a number of times at the the Percussive Arts Society International Convention and co-hosted the New Music Research Focus Day in 2014: Images of Sound: Innovations in Notation.
John is the creator and host of a podcast, Standing in the Stream: Conversations with Creatives. Through long-form conversations and audio collaborations, the podcast explores the lives and works of artists in a variety of fields from visual art, music, filmmaking, dance, writing/poetry, to everything in between. It is a podcast for and about artists seeking to live and sustain creative lives.
Currently, John is the Director of Percussion Studies and Professor of Percussion at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, TX. He taught previously at the University of Wyoming and held fellowships at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and the University of North Texas.
He received a Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, a Master of Music in Percussion Performance from the University of North Texas, and a Bachelor of Music from Stephen F. Austin State University.
John is a Yamaha Performing Artist and is an Artist with Innovative Percussion, Evans Drumheads, and Zildjian Cymbals.