| JOHN KENNEDY
John Kennedy was born in 1959 in Minnesota, and is a graduate of Oberlin College (B.M.) and Northwestern University (M.M.). In 1987, he founded Essential Music with Charles Wood. Together, they have directed all of Essential Music's activities and led performances and recordings in a wide variety of repertoire.
Since 1990, Kennedy has been Director of the Music in Time concert series (formerly known as Twentieth Century Perspectives) at the Spoleto Festival USA, in which capacity he conducts and leads guest artists and the Festival Orchestra in concerts of contemporary music. The series has been hailed widely for appealing to a wide audience while maintaining challenging programming, and has been described by The New York Times as "weird and wonderful".
As a composer, he has been a recipient of Meet the Composer awards and commissions from leading perfomers including the New Renaissance Chamber Artists, Mutable Music, and the pianist Margaret Leng Tan. His work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, including at The Kitchen (NYC), Festival Nouvelles Scenes/Dijon, Aspekte Salzburg Festival, Zurich June Festival, the Festival dei Due Mondi, and Spoleto Festival USA.
For many years Kennedy performed as a percussionist with many of New York's leading orchestras and ensembles, including the Orchestra of St. Luke's and the Stamford Symphony Orchestra. He has appeared as a soloist in contemporary music with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestra of St. Luke's. Since 1991, he has served as Personnel Manager of the Sarasota Opera Orchestra, in which capacity he selects and hires the orchestra for its annual nine-week season.
Kennedy has since 1985 designed and led music residencies in the New York City schools for New York Young Audiences. In 1994, he authored and led Young Audiences's Classical Music Month celebration workshops. He has since 1989 designed and authored education concerts and residencies for the Stamford Symphony, including a model residency featured in Symphony Magazine and the program Up Close With the Orchestra. Since 1996, he has developed Integrated Arts Education curriculum for the Stamford Schools.
Kennedy helped pioneer the resurgence of scholarship in the music of Johanna Beyer. He is the co-author with Larry Polansky of an article on Beyer in the Winter, 1997, issue of Musical Quarterly, and serves as Associate Editor of the Johanna Beyer Project for Frog Peak Music. |