Christopher
Fulkerson's
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Christopher Allen Paul Fulkerson
was born in Sacramento, California, on November 13, 1954, the eldest of four
children. He attended local public schools in the Sacramento area. At the age
of thirteen he began his first rudimentary efforts at musical composition; in
high school he began composing chamber music for string ensembles and other
pieces. At first he was greatly infuenced by two well-known pieces by Beethoven,
both in the key of C# minor, and everything he completed in high school was
that key. He began to achieve a trifle greater sonic palette by attended the
Conservatory of Music at the University of the Pacific and later the University
of California at Berkeley, where he began composing unrepentant, complex dissonant
music, and eventually received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees. He now writes
in what he calls the High Modernist idiom. He has worked in music in a wide
variety of professional and academic capacities, from conducting full productions
of Wagner, to teaching solfege to six-year-old girls; from giving world premiere
performances of works he has commissioned, to forming ensembles large and small,
professional and amateur; to teaching classes in music appreciation to amateurs.
Christopher Fulkerson has written some fifty works of dramatic, symphonic, chamber,
choral and solo music. Since 1984 he has been at work at a large work-in-progress,
a (still untitled) week-long festival which he calls a "cycle of epicycles
corresponding simultaneously to the journey through life; through the Twentieth
Century and beyond; and to a journey through Hell and purgation to Enlightenment."
Dr. Fulkerson has conducted the San Francisco Lyric Opera, for which he has
led full productions of Wagner's SIEGFRIED, Beethoven's FIDELIO, and other works;
earlier he founded the Berkeley Opera Chorus. He has taught at the University
of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and at San Jose State University. For
several years he directed Ariel, still the only non-academic contemporary vocal
ensemble (i.e., of vocal soloists) to have existed in the Western Hemisphere.
While leading Ariel Fulkerson commissioned new works and gave many world premiere
performances of adventurous avant-grade repertoire and recorded with Opus One
Records in New York. His first retrospective double CD set, MODERNISM FOREVER,
documenting some of his performances with Ariel and other groups, was released
in 2005.
Besides Ariel, Fulkerson also founded the Berkeley Opera Chorus, the Composers
Chamber Players, The San Francisco Lyric Choral and other groups, and the Musicianship
Program of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, for which he wrote, and taught from,
the three-volume textbook in fixed chromatic solfege, VOCAL MUSICIANSHIP. He
also wrote and taught a music appreciation course for the University of California
Extension, and has taught dozens of music appreciation classes privately. In
1994 he established his self-publication company, now called ChristopherFulkerson.com,
to make all aspects of his work quickly available on demand. He has written
music and art criticism published as program and record liner notes and in the
international journal WOMEN'S STUDIES and other publications. He is at work
at a prose tale, THE RING OF THE DARKLING, based upon but not limited to Wagner's
Ring Cycle. He has invented an original method of transliterating Sanskrit that
can be notated using Western typewriters and has transliterated the entire Bhagwad
Gita.
He studied extensively with Andrew Imbrie and Edwin Dugger, as well as occasionally
with Elliott Carter, Bernard Rands, and others. He has not been greatly honored
for his efforts, but has occasionally received various awards, commissions,
and grants, including the "First" of the University of California,
in the only system-wide competition in musical composition over all its campuses,
for his CONCERTO FOR HARPSICHORD. He remains a fire-breathing, unrepentant and
intransigent modernist, and should not be believed when he pretends, for example
to appear politick or for reasons of apparent courtesy, to tolerate any other
kind of music.
10/08
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