John Peel

John Peel’s current project is an opera based on the Ursula Le Guin fairy tale, A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back, commissioned by the Wallowa Valley Music Alliance in Enterprise, Oregon. Another recent work is an opera NERON KAISAR, written in collaboration with librettist M. D. Usher. Excerpts from NERON have been presented by New Music at Willamette and by St. Hilda’s College at Oxford University. Previous opera compositions include a monodrama for soprano and chamber orchestra: The Pythia, based on Paul Valéry’s La Pythie, commissioned by the ensemble Collage in Boston and an opera seria: Voces Vergilianae in collaboration with librettist M. D. Usher, commissioned by Willamette University for the opening of the Rogers Music Center in 1999. Major orchestral works include the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, commissioned by Riverside Symphony in New York and premiered in 2000 with violinist Joseph Lin and Sinfonia Romanza, first performed in 2005 by conductor James DePreist and the Oregon Symphony. Peel’s chamber music includes Scena ed Aria for violin and piano, premiered by violinist Rolf Schulte with pianist Alan Feinberg and Como un Arco de Viola, settings of poems by García Lorca for soprano and string quartet, premiered by Cuarteto Latinoamericano with soprano Janice Johnson.

Peel’s graduate studies in music composition took place at Columbia and Princeton where his teachers included Milton Babbitt, Benjamin Boretz, J.K. Randall, Claudio Spies and Charles Wuorinen. Peel has been the recipient of awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Heinz Foundation, the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, Meet-the-Composer and the American Music Center. In 1990 Peel was appointed Irene Gerlinger Swindells Professor of Music at Willamette University where he taught composition and produced New Music at Willamette, a series of concerts, residencies and lectures devoted to concert music of our time. Since retirement in 2019, Peel’s composing alternates with managing the forest at his Wallowa Mountain retreat in eastern Oregon.