Joel Sachs First Chair Music History Department and Director, Focus! Festival
Joel Sachs performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music, as conductor and pianist. As co-director of the internationally acclaimed new music ensemble Continuum, he has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and internationally. Foreign performances include festivals and concerts in Austria, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, England, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Mongolia, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. In Ukraine he also conducted concerts of American symphonic and ensemble music and presented a program of solo piano music at the Kiev Festival. Dr. Sachs conducted concerts of American music with local ensembles in Germany and Switzerland; a concert of classical and American music in San Salvador (Central America); two Continuum concerts featuring works by New York composers at Radio France's annual Présences festival, Paris; and two programs with the Mexican ensemble La Camerata de las Americas in Mexico City. Dr. Sachs has held new-music residencies at the Berlin Hochschule der Kunste; the Hochschule Mozarteum,Salzburg; Trinity College of Music, London; and the School of Music and Fine Arts in Curitiba, Brazil. He was twice a delegate to Dutch Music Days in Utrecht, Holland. His recordings appear on the Advance, CRI, Nonesuch, and Musical Heritage Society labels. A recording of music of the Americas with La Camerata de las Americas will appear in Mexico shortly.
One of the most active presenters of contemporary music concerts in New York, Dr. Sachs is wholly or partly the producer every year of some 35 concerts of recent music in New York City alone. He produces and directs The Juilliard School's annual FOCUS! festival, is artistic director of the annual 18-concert Summergarden festival at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and is a co-director of the Sonic Boom festival of contemporary music presented by a consortium of New York City's most prestigious new-music ensembles. An active music historian, Dr. Sachs, who is a member of Juilliard's music history faculty and was the first chairman of its music history department, currently is writing a biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, and makes frequent appearances on radio as a commentator on recent music. In July and August, 2001, Mr. Sachs was artistic director for New York's Summergarden series of concerts entitled Points of Origin: Composers Confront Their Traditions. Also in July of 2001, Mr. Sachs led the New Juilliard Ensemble in a concert of music by Salvatore Sciarrino as part of Lincoln Center Festival 2001.
