New Music USA Online Library

Jack Parton studied composition at Peabody Conservatory under Jean Ivey, Robert Hall Lewis, and Chen Yi. Moving to New York City in 1998, Jack spent a year as Assistant Producer at Live From Lincoln Center before becoming Principal Orchestra Librarian for the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein for a decade. Besides composing, Jack sings bass and countertenor, performing professionally with such early music groups as the New York Collegium, Pomerium, Chicago Schola Antiqua, and the New York Baroque Soloists. He also plays tuba with brass quintets, bands, occasional cabaret groups, and Dixieland ensembles.

He has written extensively for solo voice and choral forces; highlights include four Communion Services commissioned by Baltimore & New York Episcopal churches. His output also includes three commissioned works for string orchestra, the Mount Desert Island Suite and a Concerto Grosso notably, and three substantial works for full orchestra. Most of his energy is devoted to chamber music, writing sonatas for various instruments and piano, and cultivating a growing corpus of piano solo music.

While working at the American Symphony Orchestra Jack was the creator of a number of musical reconstructions and editions, notably rebuilding a complete working edition of the original version of the Chabrier opera Le Roi Malgré Lui from severly doctored materials and the original libretto, an urtext edition of Manuel Poncé’s violin concerto from Poncé’s manuscripts since published by PeerMusik Limited, a working score & parts of Bruno Walter’s First Symphony from Walter’s manuscripts, from a badly damaged full score found in the Library of Congress a full working edition of Ferdinand Hiller’s magisterial oratorio Die Zerstörung Jerusalems, and from fragmentary materials found in the attic of a theater in Vienna a working edition of Franz von Suppe's operetta Schubert.  Orchestrations have included a fresh 12-player ensemble for Oscar Straus' operetta Tapfere Soldat and arrangements and orchestrations for an updated version of Noël Coward's musical Bittersweet, both prepared for the Bard Summerscape Festival.

After a few years living in Chicago for a change of urban pace and scenery, in 2013 Jack moved back east to be closer to family and a more vibrant music world, and then spent two months that summer in Europe, singing in London and immersing himself in the techniques and philosophies of Nadia Boulanger at the European American Musical Alliance in July in Paris.

He currently resides in Boston with his long-suffering fiancé Jesse, two concert tubas, a sousaphone named Audrey, a cimbasso named Chewbacca, a helicon named Lidl Rose, a piano and his grandfather's Estey organ, and a menagerie of other assorted musical instruments.