Jan Williams

Jan Williams (born Jan Gardner Williams, July 17, 1939) is a percussionist, arts administrator, teacher, conductor, and composer who has championed avant-garde and progressive music in the United States. He is recognized as an important proponent of percussion performance and its literature. Biography Williams was born in Utica, New York, where he first studied drums in elementary school under George Claesgens. After experience playing snare drum in marching and concert bands, he began to study timpani while in high school. At Clarkson University (Potsdam, New York), then called Clarkson College, he elected an Electrical Engineering major because his teachers discouraged music as a career. Within a year, he was out of school, and the following fall he entered the Eastman School of Music to study with William Street, who advised Williams to study the keyboard percussion instruments seriously. Sometime during that year at Eastman, Williams read a magazine article that praised the work of Paul Price, a percussion teacher at the Manhattan School of Music who was performing new music for percussion ensemble. In the Fall of 1959, Williams moved to New York City to study with Price at the