Joelle Wallach

Joelle Wallach composes music for orchestra, chamber ensembles, choruses and solo voices and instruments. Her String Quartet (1995) was the American Composers Alliance nominee for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music and her Piano Quartet, Runes and Ritual, is nominated for the Prize in 2012. The New York Philharmonic Ensembles premiered her octet, From the Forest of Chimneys, written to celebrate their 10th anniversary; and the New York Choral Society commissioned her secular oratorio, Toward a Time of Renewal, to commemorate their 35th Anniversary Season in Carnegie Hall. Wallach’s ballet, Glancing Below, a Juilliard Dance Theater showcase production was commissioned by the Carlisle Project, premiered in Philadelphia, and quickly became part of the repertory of the Hartford Ballet. As early as 1980 her choral work, On the Beach at Night Alone, won first prize in the Inter-American Music Awards. Wallach grew up in Morocco, but lived for many years in New York City, where she was born. She earned bachelors and masters degrees at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University. The Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with John Corigliano, granted her its first doctorate in composition. She is a popular pre-concert lecturer for the New York Philharmonic and the Dallas Symphony where she speaks on a broad range of musical subjects, bringing fresh insights to familiar works and opening doors to modern ones and to those less frequently heard.

Compositions