JUSTIN
TAYLOR CAPPS
Dedicated
to composing intelligent new music
that neither panders to nor
precludes any influences or audiences.
Welcome
to
the online home of composer and musician Justin Taylor Capps

Justin Capps (b. 1980)
Justin
Capps became a composer in the third year of his undergraduate
education at Swarthmore College. He has been exceptionally fortunate to
study composition with Gerald Levinson, Virko Baley, Jorge
Villavicencio-Grossmann, Joel Friedman, and Thomas Whitman, all of whom
are at least partly to blame for his musical endeavors. Justin has also
had rewarding instructional sessions with Bernard Rands, Steven Stucky,
Paul Moravec, Paul Chihara, Ian Krouse, Fredrick Kaufman, Erica Muhl,
Vincent Plush, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Paul Basler, and members of
the Alta Voz Collective.
Prior to
his engagement in the practice of composition, Justin had performed
with varying degrees of success as saxophonist, oboist, English
hornist, pianist, guitarist, clarinetist, flautist, and vocalist,
receiving much of his musical education in California's Central Valley
and in programs along the Pacific Coast. When not organizing dots on a
page or actively chasing musical development with something like
abandon, Justin occupies himself with other facets of music,
literature, and unceasing admiration of his wife, Emma and his newborn
thunder stealer, Zoë Louise Capps. He received his M.M. in
Music Composition/Theory from UNLV in December 2007.
His work
has been recognized with several awards and prizes: Selection to
participate in 2007 NEON Composition Symposium, Swarthmore Scholar,
Niyomsit Scholar, Boyd Barnard Prize in Music, Garrigues Foundation
Scholarship in Music, Liberace Foundation Scholarship for Jazz Studies.