Director, Music

Ministry Position

Spiritually grounded, and a person of practiced prayer and faith, the Director of Music will work collaboratively and strategically with the Vicar, the Priest and Director of Congregational Life, Liturgy and the Arts, and the Music Leadership team to imagine and enact liturgy that transcends conventional distinctions between high and low church and inspires the lifting of hearts and minds to God in praise, thanksgiving, and adoration.

The Director of Music will serve as the principal conductor of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street. As the Principal Choral Director, the Director of Music will oversee the choral and vocal development of the choirs. Proven excellence in conducting is essential. A significant understanding and affinity for the Episcopal/Anglican musical tradition with both a deep and broad knowledge of sacred music from all periods is also required.

The Director of Music will further develop the choir’s activities with the Music Leadership team, exploring outreach and collaborative projects, including annual invitations to guest conductors. The Director of Music convenes the Music Leadership team, and with them and the Vicar, oversees all liturgical, professional, and community music programming at Trinity, helping to foster and nourish an environment where arts and music thrive for amateurs and professionals, for the congregation, and for the City of New York.

This individual must have high-level collaborative skills and demonstrate success in leading creative people in a complex organization. An open heart and generosity of spirit are essential as this people-centered role provides leadership within the congregation and community. The Director of Music must be education-minded, have at least a Master’s Degree in Music (Doctorate preferred), with excellent keyboard skills.

The Director of Music reports to the Vicar and directly supervises the Music Leadership team.

The annual salary range for this position is $200,000 to $225,000.

About Trinity’s Music Program

The music program at Trinity Church Wall Street aims to create and hold space for deep encounters with the Holy. Offering solace, inspiration, joy, connection, reflection, and invitation at each liturgy and concert, Trinity’s choirs and instrumental ensembles are committed to service as agents of healing and hope in a complex and often difficult city and world. Liturgical repertoire honors the diversity of New York City and ranges from Renaissance motets to the Anglican canon, spirituals, jazz collaborations, and new commissions, as well as large-scale works such as portions of J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Duke Ellington’s Sacred Service, and Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem. On Sunday evenings, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street offers an intimate weekly Compline by Candlelight service featuring improvisation, chant, and newly composed sacred works. A monthly choral evensong, choral scholars program, and annual competition for sacred music commissions are all underway.

Trinity has a long tradition of presenting concerts for New York City. Members of Trinity’s peerless ensembles perform in many concerts each season and have a uniquely broad range of expertise from early to new music performance, offer an extensive discography, and often champion underrepresented composers. As a pioneer in amplifying the voices of female artists, Trinity has helped incubate many new compositions, including three Pulitzer Prize-winning works by women: Julia Wolfe’s oratorio Anthracite Fields, Du Yun’s opera Angel’s Bone, and Ellen Reid’s opera p r i s m.

Trinity’s music program also promotes lifelong engagement with music through a comprehensive music education program, cultural activities, and free access to acclaimed performances. Anchor programs include free weekday Concerts at One, Jazz at One, Bach at One, and Pipes at One, which present an array of artists and styles that embrace Trinity’s diverse community.

Musical education initiatives reach more than 1,000 children each year in New York City’s underserved schools and support youth in their musical, academic, social, and emotional development, primarily through the study, performance, and appreciation of diverse genres of music. Trinity provides students with a platform to perform in their local community and at Trinity, and the church supports an annual music camp for children at a partner organization, Hour Children. The Trinity Youth Chorus program, now in its 16th year and with 100 young singers enrolled, has its own schedule of performances and collaborations, and provides regular musical leadership during liturgy, concerts, and in recordings. Trinity also offers opportunities for adults to further their musical education and experience with the semiprofessional Downtown Voices choir and the St. Paul’s Chapel Choir.

PIPE ORGANS

St. Paul’s Chapel

Noack organ 1989/2017 III/31 stops

Mechanical action

The Noack Organ Company’s Opus 161, installed in St. Paul’s Chapel in 2017, is a reconstruction of an earlier Noack, Opus 111, installed in 1989 at Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

In September 2015, Trinity Church commissioned Noack to undertake a study to explore how the Opus 111 could be re-engineered into the historic, although altered, organ case at St. Paul’s, installed by English organ-builder George Pike England in 1802. This case had been altered three times: first in 1870 by Odell, who added side wings and a crowning, exposed swell box; again in 1928 by Skinner, who provided a different swell box; and finally in 1964 by Schlicker, who removed the swell box and furnished new façade pipes. Noack’s president, Didier Grassin, deftly showed how subtle alterations could restore good proportions to the case, while permitting all of Opus 111’s 29 stops to be fitted comfortably inside.

The revitalized organ arrived in New York in September 2017 and was ready for use that November. Its official debut in February 2018 included a full week of recitals, choral offerings, and concerts with NOVUS NY, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and guest organists and soloists. Today, the instrument sometimes leads special Compline services and is featured in regular Pipes at One recitals, welcoming guest organists from around the world.

Trinity Church

Glatter-Götz & Rosales 2024  IV/113 stops

Mechanical & electric action

In 2015, Glatter-Götz Orgelbau of Pfullendorf, Germany, with Manuel Rosales as tonal designer, were engaged to envision a new instrument for Trinity Church. The new organ is conceived along the lines of its predecessors, a united instrument of 113 independent stops between chancel and gallery sections. The chancel has 28 stops across Great, Swell, Positiv, Solo, and Pedal. The gallery’s 85 stops are apportioned among Great, Swell, Choir, Rückpositiv, Solo, and Pedal.

The organ’s appearance has undergone subtle changes. In the chancel, the side portions of both cases have been rearranged to house pipes in traditional practice. On the south (left) side, a new four-stop Positiv will contain an eight-foot Principal in façade, with a flute chorus within. Opposite, the Great’s Diapason and Octave will live in the case, with the remainder of this department enclosed in the Swell. The doubly enclosed Solo will contain a chorus of powerful trumpets alongside ethereal voices.

In the nave, Upjohn’s majestic 1846 case survives as the church’s oldest continuous piece of furniture. Minor alterations are envisioned to the upper pipe flats, to increase visual interest, and new façade pipes will be installed. The gallery railing, which once housed the Erben organ’s Choir section, will now have a 10-stop Rückpositiv, with an intimate character on light wind pressure. Modifications to the gallery railing from 1970 will be reversed, and the new ‘Chaire’ case will be sensitively integrated. The interior departments are arranged in a traditional manner, with the Swell placed prominently, high up behind the crest point.

The stoplist will be published after installation. Notable features include a duophonic 32-foot Open Wood, together with three other 32-foot voices, and a quartet of Tubas of differing characters on varying wind pressures. In keeping with precedents set by the original instruments, all façade pipes will be gold-leafed. A mobile console will allow leadership from the chancel and front section of the nave. Both consoles will control the entire instrument. This organ will be completed in 2024.

Chapel of All Saints

Richards & Fowkes 2022 II/17 stops

Mechanical action, meantone tuning with alternate accidentals mechanism

In August 2016, Trinity selected Richards, Fowkes & Co. of Ooltewah, Tennessee, to design a new organ, their Opus 26, for the Chapel of All Saints in Trinity Church. Following a three-year design period, Trinity signed on with the builders for a 19-stop, two manual and pedal organ with an unusual design. The new instrument’s chief feature is its quarter-comma meantone tuning, which creates an essential ingredient for the sound-world of western music’s earliest keyboard repertoire.

The instrument will have 15 pipes per octave, with separate pipes for D#/Eb, G#/Ab, and A#/Bb. Most organs using this tuning system employ double-sharp keys, one piggybacking on the other, to permit access to each sub-semitone. In Opus 26, these pipes will be selected by three mechanical levers, one for each pair of accidentals.

The keydesk will be in the alcove that has housed both prior consoles for the 1912 Hook-Hastings and the 1984 Bozeman. The John Nash organ case will be retained with minor modifications, augmented with additional decorative screening behind, which allows the sound from Manual II and Pedal (placed in the space behind the case) to come through clearly. This organ will be completed in February 2023.

Continuo Organ (2)

Klop I/5 and I/7

Mechanical action

These versatile instruments are ideal for accompanying early music, from Renaissance motets in Sunday morning services to Bach cantatas in our Bach at One series.

OTHER INSTRUMENTS

Pianos

Yamaha CFX, 2 Yamaha CX9, Kawaii, Steinway B

Harpsichords

Dowd (1970), Zuckerman (2012). Pedal unit (2014)

Handbells – 4 octaves

CHORAL ENSEMBLE BIOS

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street

Peerless interpreters of both early and new music, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street has redefined the realm of 21st-century vocal music, breaking new ground with artistry described as “blazing with vigour…a choir from heaven” (The Times, London). This premier professional ensemble can be heard live, online, and in services, recordings, and performances described as “thrilling” (The New Yorker), “musically top-notch” (The Wall Street Journal), and “simply superb” (The New York Times).

The Choir of Trinity Wall Street leads liturgical music at Trinity Church on Sundays and Major Feasts, and at additional services throughout the year, all of which are livestreamed, providing access to a wide audience. In 2020-2022, musical excerpts were featured weekly on Trinity’s Comfort at One series and included a partnership with Amplify Female Composers to bring more music by women composers into the sacred music canon. A typical season for the choir includes performing in Bach at One, Compline by Candlelight, and many other concerts and festivals throughout the year, often with NOVUS NY, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and the Trinity Youth Chorus. The choir anchors Trinity’s critically acclaimed performances of Handel’s Messiah, which The New York Times refers to as “the best Messiah in New York.”

Recent season highlights include a full production of Considering Matthew Shepard, Handel’s Theodora at Caramoor, Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields at Carnegie Hall, Tyshawn Sorey’s Monochromatic Light at the Park Ave Armory, Notes from Ukraine at Carnegie Hall, Bach cantatas at Salle Bourgie in Montreal, and collaborations with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the American Modern Opera Company.

The choir has toured extensively throughout the United States, making appearances at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Shed at Hudson Yards, the Kennedy Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the PROTOTYPE Festival, with partners such as Bang on a Can All-Stars, the New York Philharmonic, and the Rolling Stones. Increasingly in-demand internationally, the choir has also performed at Montreal’s Salle Bourgie, Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Norway’s Stavanger Cathedral, and London’s Barbican Theatre.

In addition to the Grammy Award-nominated recordings Luna Pearl Woolf: Fire and Flood and Handel’s Israel in Egypt, The Choir of Trinity Wall Street has released recordings on Naxos, Musica Omnia, Pentatone, VIA Recordings, ARSIS, Avie Records, Acis, Cantaloupe Music, Decca Gold, and Philip Glass’s Orange Mountain Music. Trinity’s long-term commitment to new music has led to many collaborations with living composers including Ellen Reid, Du Yun, Trevor Weston, Paola Prestini, Luna Pearl Woolf, Ralf Yusuf Gawlick, Elena Ruehr, and Julia Wolfe, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning and Grammy Award-nominated work Anthracite Fields was recorded with the choir. Along with NOVUS NY, the choir also collaborated on and recorded two Pulitzer Prize-winning operas: Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone and Ellen Reid’s p r i s m.

Downtown Voices

Praised by The New York Times for its “incisive, agile strength,” Downtown Voices is a semiprofessional choir made up of volunteer singers and GRAMMY®-nominated members of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street. Conducted by Stephen Sands since its 2015 inception, Downtown Voices has performed works by Beethoven, Brahms, Hailstork, Rachmaninoff, Pärt, Webern, Ginastera, Janáček, James MacMillan, and Philip Glass, in addition to premiering Spire and Shadow by Zachary Wadsworth, a large-scale commission for the 250th anniversary of St. Paul’s Chapel.

The group made their Carnegie Hall debut in October 2022 with the Buffalo Philharmonic conducted by JoAnn Falleta for the Lukas Foss Centennial Celebration. Other recent performances include Orff’s Carmina Burana at The Ross Farm; Compline by Candlelight, Lux Aeterna, and Anthems concerts at St. Paul’s Chapel; and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the Church of St. Paul & St. Andrew. In past years, the ensemble performed Community Carol Sing concerts, Arvo Pärt’s Passio, Beethoven’s Mass in C, Dvořák’s Mass in D, and Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia. Downtown Voices has been featured several times with Andrea Bocelli and can be heard on Trinity’s epic recording Philip Glass: Symphony No. 5 released by Orange Mountain Music.

St. Paul’s Chapel Choir

The St. Paul’s Chapel Choir brings together people who love to sing and who want to be part of a warm and welcoming community. This volunteer ensemble of sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses gives singers the opportunity to make music together during weekly rehearsals and monthly services at Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan.

The choir sings a variety of liturgical choral repertoire from traditional Anglican anthems to classical and contemporary music, and often sings alongside members of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

Trinity Youth Chorus

The Trinity Youth Chorus brings together talented youth ages 5 to 18 from the five boroughs of New York City. Choristers receive individual and group training in vocal technique, music theory, sight-reading, and performance skills from a group of dedicated professionals led by Trinity’s Director of Music Education and Trinity Youth Chorus.

The choristers provide musical leadership at 9am services on Sundays, presenting repertoire from gospel and jazz traditions to the standard Anglican choral canon. The Trinity Youth Chorus performs in a variety of concerts throughout the season, often alongside Trinity’s professional ensembles: The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and NOVUS NY. Recent highlights include Orff’s Carmina Burana, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, a fully staged production of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, Ellen Reid’s Winter’s Child at the PROTOTYPE Festival, Ginastera’s Turbae ad Passionem Gregorianam and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 at Carnegie Hall, and Britten’s War Requiem with the Queens College Choral Society. Recording projects include Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 5 and Lisa Bielawa’s My Outstretched Hand with the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the Knights.

The Trinity Youth Chorus is featured in the films Love is Strange and Doubt, as well as Lisa Bielawa’s made-for-TV opera Vireo; they have sung backup for Josh Groban, the Rolling Stones, and Bobby McFerrin; and they have been heard on Public Radio International and CBS’s The Early Show.

INSTRUMENTAL ENSEMBLE BIOS

NOVUS NY

Trinity Church Wall Street’s new music orchestra, NOVUS NY, is a key player on the contemporary music scene. These “expert and versatile musicians” (The New Yorker) perform new music from all corners of the repertoire, meeting “every challenge with an impressive combination of discipline and imagination” (New York Classical Review). The orchestra’s Carnegie Hall debut, made with a formidable pairing of Ives and Ginastera, prompted The New York Times to declare that “adventure and ambition go hand in hand at Trinity Wall Street.”

With its annual appearances at the PROTOTYPE Festival, New York’s premier celebration of contemporary opera, NOVUS NY and Trinity Church Wall Street have partnered in the development of several major new works. These include Emma O’Halloran’s newest opera pairing Trade and Mary Motorhead; Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music; and Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek’s Breaking the Waves, named “Best New Opera for 2016” by the Music Critics Association of North America.

NOVUS NY recorded and performed in the East Coast premiere of Ellen Reid and librettist Roxie Perkins’ p r i s m, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019. Additional PROTOTYPE highlights include the ensemble’s East Coast premiere of Reid’s Dreams of the New World, and the world premiere of David T. Little’s revised version of Am I Born, which was recorded with NOVUS NY and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

NOVUS NY has forged strong links with many of today’s leading composers, collaborating with Paola Prestini, Sarah Kirkland Snider, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Jonathan Newman on Trinity’s “Mass Reimaginings” commissioning project, and giving world premiere performances of Laura Schwendinger’s opera Artemisia and Prestini’s interdisciplinary The Hubble Cantata, which drew an open-air audience of thousands to Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

The ensemble’s recent recordings include the GRAMMY®-nominated LUNA PEARL WOOLF: FIRE AND FLOOD, Paola Prestini’s The Hubble Cantata, Du Yun’s Angel’s Bone, Trevor Weston Choral Works, Elena Ruehr: Averno, the new opera Anna Christie by Edward Thomas; Ellen Reid’s p r i s m; and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 5.

Trinity Baroque Orchestra

Praised by The New York Times for its “dramatic vigor” and “elegantly shaped orchestral sound,” Trinity Church Wall Street’s superb period-instrument ensemble, Trinity Baroque Orchestra, has been heard in collaboration with The Choir of Trinity Wall Street in venues from New York’s Alice Tully Hall to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, performing many of the greatest masterpieces of the Baroque repertoire.

After presenting Bach’s entire monumental output of sacred vocal music during a five-year cycle of concerts in Trinity’s popular Bach at One series, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra and The Choir of Trinity Church Wall Street embarked on the Bach + One series, pairing a Bach cantata with a complementary work by a different composer, as well as The Handel Project, a multi-season initiative presenting Handel’s oratorios. The orchestra is featured annually in Trinity’s critically acclaimed performances of Handel’s Messiah, which The New York Times declares to be “the best Messiah in New York.”

Trinity Church Wall Street