James McCullough

b. 1939

James McCullough worked for twenty years at Boston State College (now the University of Massachusetts Boston campus) as Head of the Curriculum Materials Research and Resource Center to support himself as a composer. As their Literature and Curriculum Materials Specialist, he also taught the undergraduate and graduate courses in Children's and Young Adult Literature.

Later, returning full-time to music, he held a professional position at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Then, for five years he also served as the Arts Administrator of the Music, Literature, and Folk Life programs at the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences (now the Massachusetts Cultural Council).

During that time he continued to perform locally as a tenor soloist, and to compose music for many national and local Boston music organizations. A student of Daniel Pinkham and Undine Smith Moore, his complete music titles to date with their publishers are listed in The Boston Composers Project, which is published by the MIT Press, (1986).

James McCullough is also a poet, writer, actor, and avid book and CD collector. Now semi-retired, he has amassed a collection of over seven thousand CDs that he catalogs and listens to at his homes in Massachusetts and Virginia.