Prof. Joel Sachs (USA)
Emeritus Professor, The Juilliard School

Joel Sachs has been a multi-faceted member of the faculty of The Juilliard School since 1970. He is the professor of chamber music, new-music performance, and music history, the founder of the annual Focus Festival of post-traditional music, which began in 1986, and the founder and conductor of the New Juilliard Ensemble, the school’s chamber orchestra for the newest music, which began in 1993, the same year that he became artistic director of Juilliard’s concerts at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Sachs also performs a vast range of traditional and contemporary music outside the school internationally as a conductor and pianist. As co-director of the New-Music Ensemble Continuum, he has appeared in hundreds of performances in New York, nationally, and throughout Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has also conducted orchestras and ensembles in Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, Mexico, Mongolia, Switzerland, and Ukraine, and has held new music residencies in Berlin, Shanghai, London, Salzburg, Curitiba (Brazil), Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (U.K.), Helsinki, and Canada’s Banff Centre. A member of Juilliard’s music history faculty, he wrote the first full biography of the American composer Henry Cowell, published by Oxford University Press in 2012; an earlier book about J. N. Hummel, dozens of articles on many topics, and hundreds of program notes. 

Sachs often appears on radio as a commentator on recent music and has been a regular delegate to international music conferences. A graduate of Harvard College, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia. In 2002, he was given Columbia’s Alice M. Ditson Award for a conductor’s service to American music. In 2011, he became an honorary member of the American honors society Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard for his work in support of new music and received the National, Gloria Artis Medal of the Polish Government, for his service to Polish music. He has recorded for Naxos and other labels.