Primo Artists Signs Composer Joel Thompson for Worldwide General Management
Photo Credit: Rachel Summer Cheong
“Thompson’s music is alive and inquisitive, in constant dialogue with itself and the text.”
– Arts ATL
NEW YORK, NY (August 22, 2024) – Primo Artists announces the signing of composer Joel Thompson for Worldwide General Management, effective immediately.
Charlotte Lee, Founder of Primo Artists, said: “Joel Thompson is a brilliant composer and humanist, and one of the most important and promising voices of our time. His work is bold and socially engaged, telling modern stories in brilliant, stirring, and truthful ways. Embracing America’s multi-layered musical heritage but deeply rooted in the here and now, his writing is not only intelligent, sophisticated, and deeply transcendent, but also startlingly beautiful and everlasting. We look forward to working with Joel, in collaboration with Just a Theory Press, on supporting the breadth of his work as a composer, conductor, pianist, and educator and building on what is undoubtedly going to be a significant career and legacy in the canon of classical music.”
Thompson joins a distinguished roster that comprises violinists Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Nicola Benedetti, and Randall Goosby; pianists Beatrice Rana and Seong-Jin Cho; conductors Cristian Măcelaru, James Gaffigan, Gemma New, and Christian Reif; and composers Valerie Coleman and Wynton Marsalis.
Equally at home in scoring for choir, voice, piano, and the full symphonic medium, Thompson is known for prioritizing community and facilitating connection while creating music that is “alive and inquisitive, in constant dialogue” (Arts ATL) and “one of the most attractive things one has heard” (New York Classical Review). His work is both powerful and incisive in centering the concerns and desires of the voiceless and historically marginalized.
Thompson currently serves as Houston Grand Opera’s first ever full-time Composer-in-Residence, holding a five-year residency that commenced in 2022. Career honors include the 2023 Sphinx Medal of Excellence, a 2018 American Prize for his well-known choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, and the 2017 Hermitage Prize.
Thompson has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Atlanta Master Chorale, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Kansas City Symphony, American Composers Forum, and Sphinx Organization’s EXIGENCE Vocal Ensemble (of which he is a founding member), amongst others.
Recent commissions include Dove Songs, written for and performed by soprano Renée Richardson, which premiered at Houston Grand Opera in March 2024; To See the Sky, premiered in the same month by Jaap van Zweden and the New York Philharmonic and co-commissioned by the American Composers Forum, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, and Bravo! Vail Music Festival; and Fire and Blue Sky, commissioned and premiered by LA Opera in June 2024 under the baton of Resident Conductor Lina González-Granados, featuring a libretto by Imani Tolliver.
Thompson and librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney’s operatic adaptation of author Ezra Jack Keats’s award-winning illustrated children’s story, The Snowy Day, created in partnership with the author, premiered in 2021 at Houston Grand Opera. Thompson and Pinkney worked to “recreate the book’s sense of enchantment and its nuanced portrayal of race” (The New York Times) in an operatic format that is now staged nationally.
Other notable works include My Dungeon Shook (2020), which was inspired by the words of the celebrated author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. A second work setting Baldwin’s words to music, To Awaken the Sleeper, premiered at the Colorado Music Festival in 2021. Nine American orchestras signed on as co-commissioners for To Awaken the Sleeper, and multiple orchestras have performed it since its premiere.
Well known for the choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, which premiered at the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club under the direction of Eugene Rogers in November 2015, Thompson has received several accolades for the piece including the 2018 American Prize for Choral Composition and the Craft Specialty-Musical Composition/Arrangement EMMY® at The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (Michigan Chapter) 39th EMMY® Award Ceremony. Seven Last Words of the Unarmed contains seven movements, each setting to music the last words of an unarmed Black man before he was killed.
Also a conductor, pianist, and educator, Thompson holds a B.A. in Music and M.M. in Choral Conducting, both from Emory University, and is expected to complete his D.M.A. in composition from the Yale School of Music in 2025, where he studies with Christopher Theofanidis. Thompson served as Director of Choral Studies and Assistant Professor of Music at Andrew College from 2013 to 2015 and taught at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School from 2015 to 2017. He was a post-graduate fellow at Arizona State University’s Ensemble Lab/Projecting All Voices Initiative and a composition fellow at the 2017 Aspen Music Festival and School. Thompson is an alumnus of the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works commissioning program, established to foster leading talents in the field.
Thompson was born in the Bahamas to Jamaican parents before the family moved to Atlanta. He is currently based in Houston for his residency with Houston Grand Opera.
For more information on Primo Artists, click here.
For more information on Joel Thompson, click here.