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Joseph Church is a conductor, composer, arranger, pianist, and teacher of music. His career has been as varied as it has exciting, working with some of music and the theater's most remarkable talents, meeting and collaborating with musicians, performers, directors, and technicians around the world, and guiding some of the entertainment world's most promising talent. His joy in music has never waned, and Mr. Church is actively involved in the struggle to preserve live music performance and to perpetuate music as an essential part of our education and culture. Mr. Church was for nine years the music director of The Lion King on Broadway, and during that time was the music supervisor for the New York, London, Toronto, Tokyo, Osaka, and Los Angeles productions. Also with Julie Taymor, he was vocal director of the Broadway production of The Green Bird. From 1992-1995, Mr. Church served as music supervisor, conductor, and vocal arranger of The Who's Tommy on Broadway. He was the music director of the original production at La Jolla Playhouse, for which he won the Los Angeles Drama-Logue award for music direction, and was the music supervisor for the London, Toronto, Germany, and national touring companies of the show. Most recently, Mr. Church spent two years as the associate conductor of In The Heights on Broadway and was associate music director of the Public Theater’s productions of Paul Simon’s The Capeman at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Other work as a music director and conductor for the stage includes Randy Newman's Faust at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the La Jolla Playhouse, the original Off-Broadway, National, and Boston companies of Little Shop Of Horrors, and two seasons as music director at Radio City Music Hall. Mr. Church was also conductor and music director for the Grammy-winning cast albums of The Lion King and Tommy. His guest conducting includes appearances with the Gubbio Festival Opera and the Giuseppe Verdi Society Chorus and Orchestra in Umbria, Italy, the Long Island Philharmonic, the chamber orchestra Music for A Sunday Afternoon, and the Westchester Chamber Symphony. He was music director of the New York University Symphony in 2005, and has also served as assistant conductor of the Brooklyn Philharmonia Chorus and the Gubbio Festival Orchestra in Gubbio, Italy. As an arranger and orchestrator, Mr. Church has worked on The 60's Project, directed by Richard Maltby and presented at Goodspeed Musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers, commissioned by the Roundabout Theater Company, recordings of Lauryn Hill's version of "Ave Maria" and songs for the songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Gershwin's Fascinating Rhythm on Broadway, Almost September at several regional theaters throughout the U.S., and many other recordings and stage productions. As a composer, Mr. Church is in the process of completing, in collaboration with librettist and translator Sheldon Harnick, a setting of three of Jean de la Fontaine's Les Fables for chorus and orchestra. The first of the sections, “The Lion In Love,” was recently recorded featuring soloists Brian Stokes Mitchell, Howard McGillin, and Rebecca Luker. Mr. Church’s most recent work for the stage, The Thief, was written in collaboration with legendary Russian composer Vladimir Shainskiy and lyricist Lorraine Feather, and performed at the El Portal Theater in Los Angeles in 2007. His concert music includes, among other works, Three Romances for mixed chorus, Sonata for Two Pianos, Vibrachrome for solo vibraphone, Mock Opera, an avant-garde instrumental operetta, Soggiorno for piano, violin, and cello, the Duo for Violin and Viola, and Three Jazz Etudes. The Reel and Rondo from "As You Like It" was premiered on New Year's Eve, 2000, by the Long Island Philharmonic, and his Shainskiy Suite, based on themes by Shainskiy, was premiered at Carnegie-Weil Hall in April 2005. For television, Mr. Church composed the theme music for the PBS series Character Studies. He has been composer-in-residence at New York's Riverside Shakespeare Company and the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, and in all has written incidental music for over thirty plays, including Richard III, As You Like It, The Tempest, Antigone, Anna Christie, and The Rainmaker. He began his career as a composer for musical theater in 1981, composing the score for one of Off-Broadway's most infamous flops, An Evening With Joan Crawford. His other shows musicals are Fry Canyon Pop. 2 and The Evil Of Two Lessers. In 1996, Joseph Church received his doctorate in composition from New York University, where he has taught composition, conducting, and music theory since 1998. From 1996-1998 he was the co-director of the Musical Theater Program at NYU-Steinhardt. Joe's students have gone on to successful careers as performers, composers and music directors in theater, film, and universities around the country and internationally. He holds a Master's degree in choral conducting from the University of Illinois and a B.A. in music from Swarthmore College. Mr. Church has studied conducting with Paul Vermel, Tamara Brooks, and Harold Decker, composition with Menachem Zur and Todd Brief, and piano with Steven Lubin and Richard Veleta. Mr. Church was born in 1957 in Poughkeepsie,
New York. After living in Honolulu for three years, he moved to New
York City in 1965, and he has remained based there ever since. He currently
lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but his heart is often still
in Hawaii. In his very little free time, he enjoys cooking, bicycling,
and almost anything outdoors. His proudest and finest work is his daughter
Susannah Jane Church, born in 1994. |
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