Dan Armstrong, Principal bass

Having recently retired from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dan Armstrong chose Stratford as his moving-back-to-Canada destination. Before joining the CSO bass section in 1995, Dan played 12 seasons as Assistant Principal bass in the Milwaukee Symphony, and four with the Winnipeg Symphony.

Growing up in Kitimat, BC, Dan was fortunate to have a passionate and dedicated piano teacher. When he was six, his father found a plywood bass for sale at the Kitimat hardware store, and bought it to jam with students at the high school where he taught Physics and Math. Following his father’s lead, Dan enrolled at the University of British Columbia as an Engineering student; by his third year, he had moved to the Faculty of Music, playing that plywood bass and ultimately earning music degrees from UBC and the Juilliard School.

Dan has been featured as a soloist on WFMT and CBC Radio, as well as with orchestras in Milwaukee and Ottawa. He was a founding member of the popular contemporary music group Present Music in Milwaukee, and played with the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNow series under Pierre Boulez and others. His string quintet Cinco performed his arrangements and compositions in schools and community centres in Chicago, Vienna, Seoul, and the Canary Islands. In addition, he has worked with programs led by YoYo Ma, the Lullaby Project and Purpose over Pain, that help young parents and bereaved families express themselves through music. With the organization Music in Prisons, he led explorations in song writing and performing for incarcerated youth, and also wrote and recorded songs for Literacy Chicago.

As a member of the Stratford Symphony and a volunteer with the Stratford Youth Symphony, Dan is happy to be connecting with programs and people that bring music to all ages and assure that future generations have access to the arts. As Jon Batiste says, “What we love about music is not that it sounds good… (it’s) that it sounds inevitable.”