American composer
Juliana Hall (born 1958) is an American composer of art songs, monodramas, and vocal chamber music. She has been described by the NATS Journal of Singing as "one of our country’s most able and prolific art song composers for almost three decades" and, in discussing her 1989 song cycle Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, the Journal went on to assert that "Even at this very early stage in her life and career, Hall knew something about crafting music whose beauty could enhance the text at hand without drawing attention away from that text. This is masterful writing in every respect."[1][2]
Early life
Juliana Hall was born in Huntington, West Virginia in 1958 and grew up across the river in Chesapeake, Ohio. Her mother was a pianist and began teaching Juliana piano when she was six years of age. She was active in the family church, where she played, sang, and wrote her first composition. Her grandparents provided inspiration too, exposing Juliana to folk music and poetry.
Hall began her professional studies at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music as a piano major (studying with Jeanne Kirstein), but the work she did in a composition for performers class demonstrated her potential as a composer. After Kirstein died, Hall completed the final year of her bachelor's degree at the University of Louisville (where she studied with Lee Luvisi). Upon graduation, she moved to New York City to study piano (with Seymour Lipkin), sing in the choir of Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, and usher at Carnegie Hall.
After several years in New York, Hall went to graduate school at the Yale School of Music as a piano performance major (studying with Boris Berman), but also began formal composition lessons (with Martin Bresnick, Leon Kirchner, and Frederic Rzewski). At the urging of her composition teachers, she shifted her focus from piano to composition and in 1987 earned her master's degree. She then went to Minneapolis to finish her formal composition studies (with Dominick Argento).[3][4][5]
Professional life
While a student of Argento, Hall received her first commission in 1987 (from the Schubert Club of Saint Paul, Minnesota) for a song cycle – Night Dances – for soprano Dawn Upshaw, who with pianist Margo Garrett, premiered the work in December of that year.[6] After a performance of the cycle at the Library of Congress in 1988, Joseph McLellan of The Washington Post wrote that, "Juliana Hall used every trick in the book – melodic and half-spoken, tonal and nontonal. She did this to enliven the words by Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Emily Bronte , Edna St. Vincent Millay and Elizabeth Bishop, to deepen the impact of the texts dealing with night and sleep, to explore the implicit emotions in sounds that ranged from a whisper to a scream, with the piano supplying illustrations and comment and engaging in vivid dialogue."[7]
In 1989 Hall was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition.[8] Since that time Hall has composed works for many singers, among them acclaimed countertenors Brian Asawa and Charles Humphries; mezzo-sopranos Stephanie Blythe and Kitty Whately; sopranos Nadine Benjamin and Molly Fillmore; tenor Anthony Dean Griffey; baritones Richard Lalli, David Malis and Randall Scarlata; and bass baritone Zachary James. She has also composed several chamber works for the vocal duo of Korliss Uecker and Tammy Hensrud known as Feminine Musique.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
Hall was awarded the 2017 Sorel Commission from the American art song training program SongFest for a soprano song cycle, When the South Wind Sings.[18] She was later invited to be the 2018 Guest Composer at the Fall Island Vocal Arts Seminar at SUNY Potsdam,[19][20] and was also invited to be the 2018 Resident Composer at CollabFest at the University of North Texas.[21]
During her professional career, Hall's music has been performed in dozens of countries around the world. In addition to the Library of Congress, other performances have been presented at venues including the 92nd Street Y, Ambassador Auditorium, Blackheath Halls, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the French Library, Herbst Theatre, Morgan Library & Museum, Ordway Theater, St. Paul's Cathedral, Warehouse Waterloo, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and Wigmore Hall. Festival appearances include the Beverley Chamber Music Festival, Bitesize Proms, Buxton International Festival, Carmel Bach Festival, International Lied Festival Zeist, London Festival of American Music, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Ojai Music Festival, Oxford Lieder Festival, Rhonefestival für Liedkunst, Salisbury International Arts Festival, Schumannfest Düsseldorf, and Tanglewood Music Center.
Groups performing Hall's music include ÆPEX Contemporary Performance, CHAI Collaborative Ensemble, Duo Emergence, Ensemble for These Times, Fourth Coast Ensemble, Mallarmé Chamber Players, Mirror Visions Ensemble, Prismatic Arts Ensemble, The Song Company, and Voices of Change. Art song organizations, opera companies, and other presenters programming Hall's music include Art Song Colorado, Baltimore Musicales, Boston Art Song Society, Calliope’s Call, Cincinnati Song Initiative, Concerts of the Earth, Contemporary Undercurrent of Song Project, Dame Myra Hess Concert Series, dell’Arte Opera Ensemble, Joy in Singing, Lynx Project, Lyric Fest, MassOpera, Northern Ireland Opera, On Site Opera, Re-Sung, Seattle Art Song Society, Société d’Art Vocal de Montréal, Source Song Festival, Sparks & Wiry Cries, taNDem–Kunst und Kultur, and the Voces8 Foundation.
Hall's works have been broadcast over the BBC and NPR radio networks, classical stations including WFMT (Chicago), WQXR (New York) and WGBH (Boston), and overseas stations including Radio France (Paris), Radio Monalisa (Amsterdam), Radio Horizon (Johannesburg), RTVE Radio C (Madrid), and Radio SRF 2 Kultur (Zürich). Commercial recordings have been issued on the Albany, Arsis Audio, Blue Griffin, MSR Classical, Navona, Solo Musica, Stone Records, and Vienna Modern Masters labels.[22]
Juliana Hall's art song catalogue was signed by publisher E. C. Schirmer in 2017. One earlier song cycle, Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1995.[23]
