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Her dissertation, The Piano Works of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999):
An Evaluation of Social Influences and Compositional Style, in
conjunction with a program featuring some of his solo piano pieces,
contributed to the centennial celebration of this great composer's birth. She was an invited guest lecturer and
performer at the International Rodrigo Festival, hosted at Winona State University, Winona, Minnesota from November 11-17, 2001. During this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Ms. Jones joined other
Rodrigo scholars and performers who presented their research and work, and
she also met Rodrigo's daughter and owner/director of the publishing house Editorial
Joaquin Rodrigo. In 2004, Dr. Jones presented a lecture-recital about Rodrigo
specifically at the Forty-Seventh National College Music Society Meeting in San Francisco, California.
She recently was awarded a grant from the Spanish Embassy in
conjunction with U.S.
universities for a Spanish music CD recording project. Picked up by the classical recording label Centaur Records, her debut album
entitled Luces y Sombras (Lights and Shadows): Piano
Works by Joaquín Rodrigo was released in October
2007.
A native of the Central Illinois area, Ms. Jones received both the Bachelor and Master of Music
degrees in piano performance from the University of Illinois. Her
principal teachers in Illinois were Susan Hawbecker, Donna Lawson, Wilma Zonn, Lydia Artymiw, William Heiles and Andrew DeGrado. Ms.
Jones was also a rehearsal accompanist for the Villa Grove Community Theater
as well as for the Champaign-Urbana Theater Company. From 1995-1997 Ms. Jones
was on the faculty of the David Adler Cultural Center in Libertyville, Illinois, where she was a
piano instructor and staff accompanist.
In August of 2001, Dena Kay Jones completed the Doctor of Musical
Arts program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, where she studied with Steinway artist Nohema
Fernández. Among the honors awarded to Ms. Jones
include the Second Place winner of the 1998 Green Valley Piano Competition and the winner of
the 1999 President's Concerto Competition. She was the first-ever Music
Advisory Board Scholar (2000), an invited student of the 1999 Aspen Summer
Music Festival and Academy and a Medici Scholar (1998). In addition to her
professional performing and academic credits, Ms. Jones was also noted for
her development as a teacher. In 2000, she was nominated for the University
of Arizona Music Department's representative as the Best Teaching Assistant
in the Fine Arts, and in 2001, she won the Music Teachers National
Association Recognition of Achievement Award.
She joined the music faculty of the University of Texas at El Paso in 2002.
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Biography
Dena Kay
Jones has performed as soloist and chamber musician
throughout the United
States and in Spain, Mexico and Canada. Solo performances include recitals at El Centro
Municipal de Las Artes in Juarez, Mexico; the Kitchener-Waterloo
Chamber Music Concert Series (Canada) and the For the Love of Music Series in
Bisbee (Arizona); an appearance as soloist with the University of Arizona
Symphony and University of Texas at El Paso Symphony and Choirs; and
performances for world-renowned pianists Emanuel Ax and Peter Serkin at the 1998 Tanglewood
Auditions in New York, Leon Fleisher at the 1999 Aspen Summer Music Festival
and Russell Shermann at the 2000 Summer Courses in
Santander, Spain. She offered her New York Debut at Merkin Hall in March
2003, performed with cellists Zuill Bailey and Dennis Brott at the Fourteenth
El Paso Pro-Musica Chamber Festival in January 2004 and participated in the Festival Internacional
de Música de Tecla Española
(FIMTE) of Almería, Spain in 2007.
In addition to maintaining a widely varied repertoire from the
standard piano literature, Ms. Jones has focused her energies in performance
and research of the Spanish piano repertoire. In particular, her interest in
this music has led her to focus on lesser-known Spanish piano works written
from 1900-1950. Her recitals feature the colorful works of composers like
Manuel de Falla, Ernesto Halffter, Isaac Albéniz, Federico Mompou and
Xavier Montsalvage.
In 1997 Ms. Jones presented the paper Contemporary Spanish Music:
The Historical and Political Effects on Research at the National College
Music Society Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1999, she
presented Musical Language and Politics in Spain: 1900-1950 at the
Pacific Southern regional meeting of the College Music Society held in San
Diego, California.
 
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