Joseph P. Fitzmartin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1943 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Genres | American composer and arranger |
| Associated acts | One of the founders and the Music Director, Keystone State Boychoir |
Joseph P. Fitzmartin (born in Philadelphia, 1943) is an American composer and arranger. He is one of the founders and the Music Director of the Keystone State Boychoir as well as Choral Director at the William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia.
Philadelphia, known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U.S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the sixth-most populous U.S. city with a 2018 census-estimated population of 1,584,138. Since 1854, the city has had the same geographic boundaries as Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U.S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is also the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis. The Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.
The Keystone State Boychoir is a boys' choir in Pennsylvania. The group performs a wide range of songs and has sung on all seven continents.
William Penn Charter School is an independent school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, founded in 1689 at the urging of William Penn as the "Public Grammar School" and chartered in 1689 to be operated by the "Overseers of the public School, founded by Charter in the town & County of Philadelphia" in Pennsylvania. It is the oldest Quaker school in the world, the oldest elementary school in Pennsylvania, and the fifth oldest elementary school in the United States following The Collegiate School (1628), Boston Latin School (1635), Hartford Public High School (1638), and Roxbury Latin (1645).
His Concert Mass for symphony orchestra and choir, had its world premiere at Carnegie Hall and has since been performed at the Sydney Opera House, in Berlin, and in Russia by the Novgorod Symphony. Following an international composition competition, he was awarded a grant from the Basel Boys Choir of Switzerland to compose a major work for an international celebration of youth choirs. The work featured the German text of the poet Hanns Dieter Hüsch and continues to be performed throughout that country.
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, most often written by composers for orchestra. Although the term has had many meanings from its origins in the ancient Greek era, by the late 18th century the word had taken on the meaning common today: a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four, with the first movement in sonata form. Symphonies are almost always scored for an orchestra consisting of a string section, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments which altogether number about 30 to 100 musicians. Symphonies are notated in a musical score, which contains all the instrument parts. Orchestral musicians play from parts which contain just the notated music for their own instrument. Some symphonies also contain vocal parts.
An orchestra is a large instrumental ensemble typical of Western classical music, which combines instruments from different families, including bowed string instruments such as the violin, viola, cello, and double bass, brass instruments such as the horn, trumpet, trombone and tuba, woodwinds such as the flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon, and percussion instruments such as the timpani, bass drum, triangle, snare drum, cymbals, and mallet percussion instruments each grouped in sections. Other instruments such as the piano and celesta may sometimes appear in a fifth keyboard section or may stand alone, as may the concert harp and, for performances of some modern compositions, electronic instruments.
A choir is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the medieval era to the present, or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm and face gestures.
