Paul Phillips

Paul Phillips, Professor of Music and Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies, is a conductor, composer, pianist, and author who has conducted over 80 orchestras, opera companies, and ballet troupes worldwide, including the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Opera Boston, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Choir, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. Phillips is music director and conductor of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Philharmonia, and Stanford Summer Symphony, and teaches conducting at Stanford. He has also taught "Harmonic Convergence: Music's Intersections with Science, Mathematics, History, and Literature", "Black Music Revealed", "Russian Modernists: Stravinsky and Shostakovich", and “Orchestra Online”, and has led the Stanford New Ensemble and Stanford University Ragtime Ensemble, which he founded. Phillips brought Stanford Philharmonia to Bermuda in 2022 to perform at the Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts, and in 2024 led the Stanford Symphony Orchestra on a two-week tour of France and Monaco. Previously, he has led choral and orchestral tours to China, Ireland, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

Phillips has conducted over 1000 works in performance, including much of the standard repertoire and over 100 regional, US, and world premieres. He has performed with Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, and Carol Wincenc; collaborated with Steve Reich, William Bolcom, George Walker, and many other renowned composers; and led concerts featuring Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, Glen Campbell, and other pop, jazz, and rock stars. Phillips’s honors include 11 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming  of Contemporary Music, First Prize in the NOS International Conductors Course  (Holland) and Wiener Meisterkurse Conductors Course (Vienna), and selection for the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program. He has conducted two recordings with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and five for Naxos: two each with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) and Brown University Orchestra, and one with the Slovak Philharmonic.

Highlights of 2024 include the premiere of Phillips’s newest composition, “Sweet Thunder” for 12 pianos, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, and publication of “The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians, 1962-1993” by Anthony Burgess, a book “brilliantly edited and contextualised by Paul Phillips”, according to one review in the British press, and selected by the “Financial Times” as one of its three “Best Summer Books of 2024 in Classical Music”. During 2023-24, Phillips has conducted the California Orchestra Directors Association Honor Symphony Orchestra, Bay Area Rainbow Symphony, and Montecito Festival Orchestra at the Montecito International Music Festival.

Studies at Eastman, Columbia, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa, and Leonard Slatkin, among others, led to conducting posts at the Frankfurt Opera and Stadttheater Lüneburg in Germany, and with the Greensboro  Symphony, Greensboro Opera, Maryland Symphony, Savannah Symphony, and Rhode Island Philharmonic in the United States. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 2017, Philllips was Director of Orchestras and  Chamber Music at Brown University from 1989-2017, and Music Director/Conductor of the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Massachusetts from 1994-2017.

Phillips has received numerous commissions and awards for his compositions, which include opera, ballet, chamber music, choral music, song cycles, and orchestral works published by Barnard Street Music. His chamber arrangement of Stravinsky’s opera “Mavra”, published by Boosey & Hawkes, has been performed  by the Royal Opera House and at Glyndebourne and is featured in Bayerische Staatsoper’s “Mavra/Iolanta”, a 2022 DVD/Blu-ray Disc cited as a “Critic’s Choice” recording by “Opera News” (July 2023). As a pianist, Phillips has performed at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Mohawk Trail Concerts, Orvieto Musica, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Lincoln Center, plus many other series and venues. He has also led numerous clinics and workshops, including the American Composers Orchestra EarShot Program with the Pioneer  Valley Symphony and a Conductors Guild Conductor Training Workshop at Stanford featuring guest composer Gabriela Lena Frank.

Prior to “The Devil Prefers Mozart”, Phillips wrote “A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess” and contributed essays to six other books about Burgess, including the Norton Critical Edition of “A Clockwork Orange”. As a music theorist, Phillips is best known for his article “The Enigma of 'Variations': A Study of Stravinsky’s Final Work for Orchestra” in "Music Analysis", which is cited by Richard Taruskin in "Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions" as “the best exposition in print of Stravinsky’s serial methods.” Phillips is featured in several documentaries: “The Burgess Variations”, “Listening to the World: Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at Brown”, and “Fall and Fly”, about the eponymous work for twelve pianos whose premiere he conducted in 2022 at San Francisco Botanical Garden’s Flower Piano Festival. Other film activity includes serving as music advisor to “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale”, starring Richard Gere, and a brief on-screen appearance with Arnold Schwarzenegger in “True Lies”.

Phillips has chaired the Music Department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee and served on many other departmental committees. He was President of the Western Region of the College Orchestra Directors Association from 2022-24 and has served as Music Advisor to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, England, since 2015. For further information, visit paulsphillips.com.