Joelle Wallach

b. 1946

Joelle Wallach composes music for chorus, orchestra, chamber ensembles, and solo voices. Her String Quartet 1995 was the American Composers Alliance nominee for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The New York Philharmonic Ensembles premiered her octet, From the Forest of Chimneys, written to celebrate their tenth anniversary.

To commemorate their thirty-fifth anniversary season in Carnegie Hall, the New York Choral Society commissioned her secular oratorio, Toward a Time of Renewal, for two-hundred voices and orchestra. As early as 1980 her choral work, On the Beach at Night Alone, won first prize in the Inter-American Music Awards.

Wallach grew up in Morocco, but makes her home in New York City, where she was born. Her early training in piano, voice, theory, bassoon and violin included study at the Juilliard Preparatory Division, and she earned bachelors and masters degrees at Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University, respectively. In 1984, the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied with John Corigliano, granted her its first doctorate in composition.