page_title: Michael Alden Bayard
section_title: Early life and education
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Alden Bayard / Early life and education
caption_attribution_description: English: Bayard playing timpani at age 14 in black and white
context_page_description: Michael Alden Bayard is an American percussionist, drummer, composer, recording artist, music lecturer, and author. A graduate of the Juilliard School of Music Pre-College Division and the Curtis Institute of Music who made his Carnegie Hall debut at age 16, Bayard has performed percussion and timpani under numerous conductors. As a percussion soloist, he served with the Sacramento Symphony as the principal percussionist for 17 years and has been featured with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Pops Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, Queens Symphony, Joffrey Ballet Orchestra, Jacksonville Symphony, Reno Philharmonic, Stockton Symphony, and Santa Rosa Symphony. Bayard currently performs with Grammy award-winning Mary Youngblood.
context_section_description: Michael Bayard was born in Manhattan, New York, and attended public school in Flushing, Queens. His father Leo Bayard was a professional actor who studied at the Max Reinhardt Theatre and is known for his work in the touring company of the Broadway play Detective Story (1949), and with Lux Video Theatre and the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse. His mother Betty Bayard (stage name Elizabeth George) was an actress who later operated a drama and dance school with his father in Queens, New York.
  
  Bayard's parents encouraged his talents as a performer from a young age. At age 12, he began practicing diligently on a rubber drum pad in his basement in Flushing, Queens, developing both discipline and musical ability. During these basement years, Bayard was fascinated by dramatist and science fiction writer Rod Serling, inspired in part by Serling's development of his passion for the arts in his own family's basement. 
  At age 15, Bayard attended the Juilliard School of Music Pre-College Division on full scholarship, in the field of percussion and timpani. At 16, he performed his Carnegie Hall debut on solo percussion with the New York Youth Symphony.  In 1975, at age 17, Bayard appeared as a musician in the notable Coca-Cola commercial "Look Up America." In 1976, Bayard attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia on full scholarship. At Curtis, Bayard performed percussion and timpani under conductors Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado, Leonard Slatkin, Paul Paray, Klaus Tennstedt, Yuri Temirkanov, and Dmitri Kitayenko. At Curtis in 1977, Bayard was artifact consultant on the Leopold Stokowski Musical Instrument and Orchestral Score Collection, which included a collection of exotic and unusual musical instruments acquired by Stokowski during his world travels. There, he gained an appreciation of ancient instruments that would inform his later career. During his Curtis years, Bayard performed on percussion with the Queens Symphony Orchestra and the New Jersey Symphony. He also performed as part of duo with percussionist Andrew Power on a Philadelphia Orchestra program in Mallet Mania. In his final year with the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, Bayard played principal timpani in a performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. This particular performance is arguably considered one of the most intense and ferocious performances of this work in the last century.
  During the summers from 1976 through 1985, Bayard played drum set in the show bands and lounge bands at several legendary Catskill Mountain resorts in upstate New York, namely Grossinger's, Kutsher's, and the Pines Hotel in the "Borscht Belt", and the Pine Springs Resort in Freehold, New York. During his Catskill summers, in the waning days of the Borscht Belt's glory years, Bayard worked with Frank Sinatra Jr., Enzo Stuarti, and Billy Daniels.
caption: Bayard playing timpani at age 14
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