keyboard featured composer

This month we got to know composer Michael Burkhardt, who is particularly known for his skill as an organist, choral clinician, hymn festival leader, and for his creative work with children.

How did you first become involved with music?

This month we spent some time getting to know composer and music minister James Biery.

How did you first become involved with music, and what drew you to composition?

I was fascinated by music from an early age, starting piano lessons at age seven and then organ at eleven. As a teenager, I discovered that full-time church music was a career option, and from that moment there was no turning back! As an organ student at Northwestern University, I was almost entirely focused on performance. It was only later after I started work as a church musician that I began to write music of my own. It was a way to come up with music that was needed for particular occasions. Those first pieces were mostly shorter choral pieces. The organ music came later.

What is your compositional process like? Do you wait until everything is clear in your head, then write it down, or do you start writing and see where it takes you?

This month we interviewed K. Lee Scott, a composer known for his extensive collection of original choral works and his Alabama roots.

How did you first become involved with music, and what drew you to composition?

I started music lessons when my father received a piano from a gentleman who offered it as partial payment for a debt he owed. My dad had it tuned, and a piano teacher was engaged. I practiced so much that my parents would ask if it might be time for me to take a rest.

What is your compositional process like?

Acclaimed as "one of the finest products of the American organist school," [La Nuova Venezia] Neil Harmon enjoys a career as organist, conductor, composer, and teacher. He is Director of Music and Organist at Grace United Methodist Church in Wilmington, Delaware, where he directs a semiprofessional choir, a youth choir, and two bell choirs. A graduate of The Eastman School of Music (DMA, MM) and Brigham Young University (BM), Dr. Harmon has performed in South America, Europe, and the United States. His organ teachers include Linda Wildman, Parley Belnap, Richard Elliott, Don Cook, Russell Saunders, David Craighead, and Michael Farris.

Robert Lau talks to us about life as a composer.

How did you get involved with music, and what drew you to composing?

I began violin lessons at the age of seven.  Interest in other instruments soon followed, so that by my high school years I played violin in the orchestra, oboe and flute in the band, piano in the jazz band, sang in the choir and played the organ in church.  Many of my colleagues (and people of the choral and organ world) don't know that I was a string player all my life -- violin in under- graduate school and viola in graduate school.  I also taught both instruments privately and played viola professionally in a string quartet.