HUNT: Accolades for a music leader

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David Steeves hits all the right notes as the first winner of the Fredericton Arts Alliance Sturnz Award.

The 62-year-old middle school music teacher is passionate about his profession – he works through his noon hours and his prep periods in teaching choir and band at Devon Middle School.

“I do bus duty in the morning so I can have the noon hours and the prep periods free,” he said. He also teaches five classes a day.

“It’s a full day every day,” he shrugged. “But it’s very rewarding.”

The Sturnz Award, for instance. It was established to honour the late George Strunz and his wife, Annette, who died just months apart in 2022. George Strunz was a board member and past president of the Fredericton Arts Alliance, a non-profit organization formed in 1999. The award recognizes a public school teacher who makes extra effort to ensure young people are exposed to the arts, whether it be music, drama or visual arts.

It’s meaningful to Steeves, not only because he’s the first winner, but because he knew Sturnz personally.

“He was a very fine man, and I enjoyed talking to him,” Steeves said. “In his later years, he moved down the hall from my parents at St. Anne’s Court retirement home. He wasn’t one of my best friends, but he was an acquaintance I highly respected. You’d never find a kinder man.”

Steeves, a Moncton native, graduated from Moncton High in 1979 and went to Cairn University, a Christian college in Philadelphia, graduating with a combined music and theology degree, studying organ, choral directing and voice. Even before he graduated, he heard from Rev. Fred Smith at Brunswick Street Baptist Church inviting him to work there. He ran music camps that summer – 40 years ago now – and found his calling.

“I would say the bug had always been in me for working with kids and doing music because I was so committed to seeing kids be offered music at a young age,” he said. “I’ve spent my life doing that. There’s nothing like their young voices. There’s nothing like seeing a child take up an instrument, nothing like seeing a child learn to read music.”

He served at Brunswick Street Baptist for 11 years in his first stint, returned, and has played the organ there for the past decade.  Among his students, in both piano and voice, was internationally renowned soprano Measha Bruggergosman-Lee.

In 2009, he decided he needed a change. At 48 years old, he decided to pursue a bachelor of education degree at St. Thomas University.

There’s nothing like seeing a child take up an instrument

David Steeves

“I enjoyed it immensely … I enjoyed the kids who were there,” he said.

Upon graduation from university, he went to work at middle schools: four days a week at first, Devon in the morning, George Street in the afternoon. He led the St. Thomas choral society on an interim basis for a year; helped out at Devon Park before they made the move to Fredericton Christian Academy. The common thread through it all was music.

“Music does so much for a person in their mental, their physical, their spiritual development … all those elements of who a person is comes right out in music,” he said. “That’s why I’ve been so committed to it.”

At school, he introduces the students to a broad range of topics and genres – “everything from the beginnings of rock ‘n’ roll to calypso … let them know what’s out there.”

But he puts a lot of work into the extracurricular stuff. There are 23 kids in the band this year: flute, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, trumpets and percussion, and people who come in to help with the string orchestra featuring violin, viola and cello. Sixteen kids sing in the choir, about average in a building where voices change.

Steeves is humbled by the honour. He’ll accept the award at a reception Oct. 19 at Charlotte Street Arts Centre.

“There are so many music educators who are so deserving of this,” he said. “It was a very, very nice surprise. And with George, it becomes even more meaningful.”