Durrell Bowman

Joint Honours Music & Applied Studies Co-op, 1989

Durrell Bowman
Dr. Durrell Bowman grew up in Floradale, took piano lessons as a child, and then began to sing in choirs, write keyboard-based songs, and so on while attending Rockway Mennonite Collegiate. He continued to excel in his education while a music major at Conrad Grebel University College and was the first and only University of Waterloo student to complete an Honours BA in Music and Arts Applied Studies Co-op with an option in Society, Technology & Values. 

His interest in music history and culture led to an MA in musicology at the University of Toronto, during which time he worked as a TA and RA and also sang semi-professionally in a number of church and community choirs. He was then accepted with a significant fellowship into the innovative musicology graduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he completed his PhD. His dissertation, "Permanent Change: Rush, Musicians' Rock, and the Progressive Post-Counterculture," interpreted and contextualized the music of the Toronto-based, Canadian rock band Rush. 

Durrell has developed and taught 31 sections of 22 different university courses (especially ones on popular music and film music), written book chapters and journal articles, presented dozens of conference papers, contributed numerous program notes and reference articles, and developed websites and web content. He has published three books: Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United (co-editor and three chapters, Open Court, 2011), Experiencing Rush: A Listener's Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener's Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). His book chapter, "Be Sharp: The Simpsons and Music," is forthcoming in a collection about the TV show (McFarland, 2018-19).

He also completed a Certificate in Computer Applications Development at Conestoga College and a Master of Library of Information Science (MLIS) at Western University. In addition, he has been a Visiting Scholar at Grebel, done cataloguing and collections internships in its library, and worked on composing a higher-education-themed concept album, called The Tower.

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