Joseph C. Phillips Jr.
The compositions of Joseph C. Phillips Jr. are not limited or defined by any one genre but rather are an amalgamation, transmuted into a singular and individual style. Phillips calls his style mixed music; the term is inspired by mixed race people who have traits and characteristics that come from each individual parent, from the melding of the two, and their own uniqueness. Mixed music is an organic fusing of various elements from many different influences, forming compositions that are personal, different, and new.
His achievements in composition have been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, NPR, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, The New Yorker, and many others; and he has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, Composing in the Wilderness Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Arts Fund award, NewMusic USA project grant, an American Composers Forum Jerome Foundation grant for New Music, Meet the Composers Creative Connections grant, an American Music Center CAP grant, two Live Music for Dance commission grants, and two Puffin Foundation grants. In addition to the worldwide performances of his works, including by the San Francisco Symphony, GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, a Composer Portrait at the Wild Shore Music Festival in Alaska, and at the Steve Reich Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, new works have been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave Festival, the Kaufman Center and the Ecstatic Music Festival, Maryland Opera Studio, pianist Lara Downes, violinist Curtis Stewart, the NextNOW Fest, the Neighborhood Classics Concert Series for Face the Music, The Crossing choir, the St. Olaf College, the University of Maryland, the University of Denver, the University of Utah, the Fieldston School, Edisa Weeks and the Delirious Dance Company, Take Dance Company, Maffei Dance Company, and a number of other musicians and ensembles.
In the year 2000, Phillips started and still conducts Numinous, a flexible and unique large ensemble that performs his music. Through its numerous performances—such as at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM)'s Next Wave Festival, the Ecstatic Music Festival and Merkin Concert Hall, (Le) Poisson Rouge, and Roulette—and critically well-received recordings The Grey Land (New Amsterdam Records, 2020), Changing Same (New Amsterdam Records, 2015), Vipassana (Innova recordings, 2009), and The Music of Joseph C. Phillips Jr. (Numen Records, 2003), Numinous and Phillips’s music generate emotions in the listener that resonate with beauty, mystery, and wonder in order to challenge, enlighten, and refresh.
Currently Phillips is working on various commissions and new projects including developing 1619, an eight-opera cycle initially inspired by the 2019 New York Times series The 1619 Project and the 2014 Ta-Nehisi Coates The Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations.”
