In this Musical Moment, VocalEssence artistic director and founder Philip Brunelle shares insider information and beautiful music by the composer Edward Barnes.
Edward Barnes
b. 1958
Edward Barnes is a renowned composer, Broadway producer, and public speaker. Barnes studied music composition at the Juilliard School with composers Vincent Persichetti and David Diamond, and at Dartington Hall in the United Kingdom with composer-conductor Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Early in his career, he established himself as an opera composer, working in Boston as resident composer of Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston and later at the Los Angeles Opera where he wrote and music-directed his original operas “A Muskrat Lullaby”, “A Place To Call Home”, “Mystery on the Docks” as well as the opera revue “Murder at the Opera”. His interest in theater and musical theater led him to found The Metro Ensemble, a new musical theater group based in Los Angeles for whom he created the critically acclaimed shows “The Vagabond Queen”, “Old Aunt Dinah’s Sure Guide To Dreams & Lucky Numbers”, and “The Bones of Love”. He received a Drama Desk nomination for his co-adaptation of the Vortex Theater’s off-Broadway production of “HMS Pinafore” in 2007. A resident artist at the Ucross Foundation, the Instituto Sacatar in Brazil, and the Fundación Valparaíso in Spain, he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Stephen Sondheim Award. In recent years, Barnes has remained active as a producer of several Broadway, off-broadway productions, and independent projects and composer of operas and choral pieces.
Suggested Choral Pieces:
- Union (Lauren Keiser Music HL.41353)
- The Morning Trumpet
- Songs of St. Columba (Lauren Keiser Music #X078024)
For more information about Barnes or his work, please visit https://www.edwbarnes.com/.