Dr. Denise Rowan

Dr. Rowan received her Bachelor of Music Education degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Massachusetts, and her Master of Music and Doctorate of Musical Arts degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  Her career in music education spans forty plus years of directing bands and orchestras from Maine through Massachusetts and, for seven of those years, Dr. Rowan served as the Music Director/Conductor of the Starkville/ Mississippi State University Symphony Orchestra.  Dr. Rowan has been the double reed instructor at Mt. Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Massachusetts, Mississippi College, in Clinton, Mississippi, and is currently the bassoon instructor at Mississippi State University. 

As a performer she has played in orchestras throughout the Eastern United States, Pensacola, Florida, and for eleven years she performed as a member of the Mississippi Symphony, the Mississippi Ballet Orchestra, the Mississippi Opera Orchestra, the St. Andrews Chamber Orchestra, and as a guest with the Tupelo, and the Meridian Symphony Orchestras. Currently, Dr. Rowan serves a principal bassoonist with the Starkville, Mississippi State University Symphony Orchestra, and the Corinth Symphony Orchestra in Corinth, Mississippi.  She performs regularly with the Millennia Musicae Chamber Ensemble of which she is a founding member, as well as with the faculty quartet at Mississippi State University. A recording of the Millenia Musicae Chamber Ensemble has been published on the Centaur label.

Her professional associations include the following: past president of the Mississippi Bandmasters association, with a life time membership in this association,  serving as past president of the Mississippi Chapter of the Women Band Directors Association, induction into the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society, and the Mississippi chapter of the Phi Beta Mu Band Fraternity.  In 2002 Dr. Rowan was awarded the National Federation of Interscholastic Music Association’s Outstanding Music Educator Award, and in 2010 she was inducted into the Starkville Area Education Hall of Fame as an outstanding educator.  She is a current member of the International Double Reed Society, the College Music Society, and the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors. 

Dr. Rowan and her husband of forty-seven years live in Starkville on their horse farm.  She has two grown children, one foster daughter, and four grandchildren.