Overview
Dr. Timothy Jones is a Wichita native who currently serves as Associate Concertmaster of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra and Assistant Professor of Music at Wichita State University. He holds degrees in Music Education and Violin Performance, having received his doctorate in Performance with Dr. Fredi Gerling at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Dr. Jones has performed as both soloist and concertmaster with ensembles in North and South America. He first earned a permanent position with the Wichita Symphony at age 17, and in later years assumed orchestral leadership roles including Principal Violin II of the San Luis Obispo Symphony (California) and Guest Concertmaster of the Newport Symphony Orchestra (Oregon).
In addition to his orchestral career, Jones is an avid educator of students of all ages. He remains active in private and group instruction, and has held positions at independent music schools in both the United States and Brazil. Additionally, in each of these countries, Jones has been involved with social projects providing music education to youth in rural communities. He taught strings at the middle school level in the Wichita Public Schools, and in higher education he lectured at Azusa Pacific University and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul prior to his appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor at Wichita State.
Much of Jones’s work in music education integrates chamber music within his pedagogical approach. He collaborated in the creation, scripting, and presentation of a range of interactive music education experiences for elementary school students as part of the Strings, Kansas! initiative. Through his work as a teacher at the Popular Institute of Art Education in Brazil, he led a Baroque chamber ensemble in performances of unique arrangements which respected the Baroque tradition while enabling underprivileged students to perform pieces not originally suited to the available instrumentation. In the United States, Jones co-created an educational presentation for young students centered around Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8.
Not only within the context of pedagogy, Jones has long been an advocate and performer of chamber music. While living in Brazil, he participated in multiple collaborations of professors from several regions of North and South America. Additionally, he participated in several non-traditional projects such as the Zeitgeist New Music Ensemble and the Broadview Experimental Improvisation Ensemble — the latter, a group of six musicians which performed new music and spontaneous improvisations weekly in unorthodox venues. In recital, Jones performs a wide range of works and brought several pieces to the stage in southern Brazil which had rarely or never before been performed in that region, such as Szymanowski’s complete Mythes (1915) as well as works by 20th-century American composers Augusta Read Thomas and George Rochberg.
When not playing or teaching, Dr. Jones enjoys hiking, camping, mathematics and cosmology.