Justin Preece

Justin Preece is a percussionist, composer, and educator currently residing in Corvallis, Oregon. He performs regularly with the Oregon Coast Music Festival Orchestra and the Newport Symphony, and has enjoyed appearances with the Portland Opera, Chintimini Chamber Music Festival, Hilltop Big Band, and the Sundays@3 Recital Series. He composes for solo and chamber percussion with premieres of his music occurring at the Northwest Percussion Festival and the Oregon State University Soundbox Festival, and is a workshop clinician and faculty mentor with the Oregon Coast Youth Symphony Festival Composer’s Symposium. Justin previously worked as a freelance musician in Dallas, Texas, held principal positions with Symphony Arlington and the Las Colinas and Garland Symphony Orchestras, and played in numerous musical productions for Theatre Three and Lyric Stage. He appears on the 2008 Dallas Winds recording of the music of Percy Grainger.

Justin serves as a State Chapter Officer for the Percussive Arts Society and sits on the PAS University Pedagogy Committee. He has presented at the Oregon Music Education Association (OMEA) conference and area percussion festivals, recorded instructional videos for the Oregon All-State high school timpani etudes, and written on the topic of percussion education for The Instrumentalist. In addition to his position at Willamette University, Justin is on the music faculty at Oregon State University.

Justin holds degrees in Percussion Performance (M.Mus., B.Mus.) and Music Education (B.Mus.) from Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) Meadows School of the Arts, with additional study at King’s College London and the Royal Academy of Music (UK). His principal teachers in percussion have included Doug Howard, Kalman Cherry, Kurt-Hans Goedicke, Drew Lang, and Jeff Prosperie. Justin has academic and artistic interests in the role of percussion in the contemporary music landscape, the place of human musical agency in an era of computational representation, and the structure and institutional direction of music education in Oregon.