Premise and Goals
Broken Consort Technologies is a consortium of like-minded and multi-talented individuals who have decided to give back to the community and civic music community in a way that corresponds both to a definite need as well as their own skill-sets. The disparate and varied team is led by Richard L. Byrd and Todd Jonz, with scores of others lending their time, talent, and viewpoints to keep everything running smoothly. All members of BCT are volunteers and no commercial charge is made for any of our services and/or sites and/or web applications.
We are continually searching for new projects and volunteers. Please use one of the links below to communicate with BCT directly if you have ideas, concepts, projects of your own, or wish to volunteer your services, no matter what they may be, for the betterment of amateur musicians world-wide.
Principals
Dr. Richard L. Byrd
Richard L. Byrd, Forum Director, is a holder of music degrees from the University of South Alabama in Mobile, AL, and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Principal professors included Frederick Goossens, Peter Westergaard, Hubert Howe, and Andrew Imbrie (composition), Orland Thomas and Daniel Drill (trombone), and Gerald Welker and Carleton McCreery (conducting). Acquiring additional coursework in theory and electronic music, he taught college-level courses for six years, then moved to a private secondary institution in Indiana as an instructor and principal before redeploying his vocational focus to information technology. After moving to Chicago, he worked in advanced medical software technologies at Northwestern University, then rode the dot-com beast to immolation with a mid-sized startup. Dr. Byrd is now president and CEO of Houston-based Technical Operations, Inc.
Artistically, he is the music director of The Woodlands Concert Band as well as being an active freelance musician, performing in jazz and classical groups in the Houston area on tenor trombone, bass trombone, tuba, euphonium, and percussion, and is a member of the Texas Renaissance Brass, which performs annually at The Texas Renaissance Festival. He also occasionally hauls out a sackbut, shawm and/or krummhorn in this capacity, much to the horror of listeners--that is, those who weren't already horrified at the sight of a 6'4" man with an Edwards B454, heavy gauge bell, dual-bore slide and independent Thayers wearing a 9-yard kilt of Baird hunting.
When not running ninety-to-nothing between all these activities, Dr. Byrd enjoys reading--voraciously--as well as researching naval battles of the Napoleonic wars, medieval and Renaissance music theory, pre-1750 European history, and cracking stupid, allusive, referential jokes and witticisms that nobody gets.
A native of Flomaton, Alabama, he is continually amazed that he managed to escape from that portion of the north American continent that Hernando de Soto pronounced "uninhabitable by human beings." (He was right) His personal website, part blog, part bully-pulpit, part scriptorium, is Satirica.
Todd Jonz
Feeling somehow unfulfilled with his mastery of the ever-popular tonette in Mrs. Hoffman's fourth grade class, Todd Jonz was steadfast in his resolve to take up the trombone (although the genesis of this resolve is lost to posterity.) Despite the fact that his arm was not quite long enough to reach sixth position, he began trombone lessons that same year and was permitted to join the high school band as a fifth grader (there are certain advantages to beginning one's musical career in a very small, very rural town in central Kentucky.) But youthful passions being what they are, his interests were channeled elsewhere by the time he entered high school, and his beloved King Cleveland Superior spent the next thirty years in a closet.
After receiving a B.A. in Drama from Yale University, Todd briefly pursued a career in the theatre before realizing that there was a certain friction between earning a livable wage and undertaking a career in the arts. Having taken a handful of computer science courses at Yale (purely to meet distribution requirements, of course) he turned his attention to the computer industry in the mid '70s. After receiving a lucky break and joining the data processing department of a large produce company in Salinas, California, Todd spent the next twenty-odd years as a software engineer in California's Silicon Valley with IBM/ROLM, 3Com, and Sun Microsystems. In 1994 he was a founder of Infoseek, the first commercial search engine on the Internet, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in 1998 (and subsequently twiddled, re-twiddled, and ultimately disbanded with then Disney CEO Michael Eisner's infamous 2001 pronouncement that the Internet was "not ready for primetime.") Fortunately Todd left Infoseek shortly after the company went public and well before the high tech bubble burst, and had the extreme good fortune to retire at a relatively young age after selling his interest in the company.
Soon after he retired Todd's wife gave him the Bach 16 he had always lusted after in his youth as a Christmas present, and continuing his pursuits as a trombonist has occupied the vast majority of his time ever since. Today he lives in Vermont with his wife, Susan, and their two English springer spaniels, Max and Maggie. He plays regularly with several college and community bands, a big band, a Dixieland combo, and two brass quintets (truth be known, Todd has no pride whatsoever and will play with anyone foolish enough to let him sit in.) While his skills as a trombonist are surpassed by many, his love for the instrument is exceeded by none.
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