JULIANA HALL – AMERICAN ART SONG COMPOSER

American art song composer Juliana Hall specializes in creating vocal works: “glistening, poignant music” (Gramophone), “complex in conception and construction” (Planet Hugill, London) with “graceful, nuanced vocal lines” (Opera News).

Hall’s more than 60 song cycles, monodramas, and vocal chamber works have been described as “brilliant” (Washington Post), “beguiling” (The Times, London), and “the most genuinely moving music of the afternoon” (Boston Globe) — “masterful writing in every respect” (NATS Journal of Singing).

Hall attended the Yale School of Music as a graduate student, studying composition with Frederic Rzewski, Leon Kirchner, and Martin Bresnick, receiving her masters degree in 1987. Following Yale she moved to Minneapolis to study with renowned vocal composer Dominick Argento.

strikingly imaginative … gracious to sing and hear, interesting piano accompaniments, always worthy texts

— Dominick Argento

Shortly after arriving in Minnesota later in 1987, she wrote a song cycle as a first commission for soprano Dawn Upshaw. The piece received both popular and critical acclaim, with performances across America and around the world. In 1989, Hall was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, as well as her second commission for a song cycle for Metropolitan Opera baritone David Malis.

Since completing her studies, Hall has composed works for dozens of singers, including vocal luminaries Brian Asawa, Stephanie Blythe, Molly Fillmore, Anthony Dean Griffey, Zachary James, Randall Scarlata, and Kitty Whately.

revealing each morsel of poetry through her brilliant tonal, textural, and rhythmic language, her work is immediately recognizable and wonderfully familiar … singers and audiences alike take delight in her songs

— Stephanie Blythe

Hall’s music has been performed at venues such as the 92nd Street Y, Ambassador Auditorium, Blackheath Halls, Concertgebouw Recital Hall, DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Herbst Theatre, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Library of Congress, Ordway Music Theater, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, and Wigmore Hall.

Hall’s music has also been performed at numerous festivals, among them the Bitesize Proms, Beverley Chamber Music, Buxton International, Carmel Bach, Festival Internacional de Música de Cámara de Barranquilla, Limes, Music and Beyond, Norfolk Chamber Music, Ojai, Oxford International Song, Salisbury International, Source Song, and Voces8 Live from London Festivals, in addition to the International Song Festival Zeist, Lindsey Christiansen Art Song Festival, London Festival of American Music, Northern Ireland Opera Festival of Voice, Rhonefestival für Liedkunst, Schumannfest Düsseldorf, and the Sparks & Wiry Cries songSLAM Festival.

one of the finest text setters writing English song anywhere … leading with her distinctive and feminine voice combined with a big pianist’s brilliance and her uncanny way of writing music that gives singers the ability to be better than their best

— Margo Garrett

In discussing her long-time career interest in writing vocal music, Hall shares that, “I have rarely gone a day without some sort of text in my mind, primarily poems, but also diaries, fables, letters, play texts, and sacred writings. Great writers illuminate beauty, truth, and magic present in even the smallest of things in our world, and since song is all about text, it is those writers’ insights I wish to share in my songs.”

. . . read more about Juliana Hall

By the time [Dawn Upshaw] sang her encore Saturday at the Library of Congress … she had given a breathtaking display of virtuosity in ‘Night Dances,’ a brilliant cycle of songs … whose composer, 30-year-old Juliana Hall, used every trick in the book—melodic and half-spoken, tonal and nontonal … to deepen the impact of the texts dealing with night and sleep, to explore the implicit emotions in sounds that ranged from a whisper to a scream, with the piano supplying illustrations and comment and engaging in vivid dialogue

— Washington Post

Some Things Are Dark
Dawn Upshaw soprano : Margo Garrett piano

At That Hour When All Things Have Repose
Stephanie Blythe mezzo-soprano : Alan Louis Smith piano

The Mystic Trumpeter
Anthony Dean Griffey tenor : Warren Jones piano

A World Turned Upside Down : August 13, 15, 16, 17, 2025
Waterperry Opera Festival : Waterperry, Oxfordshire, UK
Ana Balestra soprano : Su Choung piano

A World Turned Upside Down : November 5, 2025
The Howard Room at JW3 : London, UK
Ana Balestra soprano : Su Choung piano