Download Jeff Paul Bio - League of American Orchestras

Jeffrey Paul
Principal Oboe
South Dakota Symphony Orchestra
Jeff Paul, principal oboist with the South Dakota
Symphony Orchestra, grew up in Southern
California where he gained experience and
expertise in various forms of performing arts. He
was an aspiring concert pianist by the age of ten,
and was awarded opportunities to perform piano
concerti with the Conejo Youth Symphony and the
Photo Credit: Jeff Paul
Pepperdine University orchestra during his middle
and high school years. His involvement as an actor/singer in community theater productions
through his youth expanded his interests and since then he has become well- versed in
composition, jazz/rock, improvisation, and ethnic folk musics. Paul attended the Eastman School
of Music (BM with performer’s certificate, 1999) and the University of Southern California (MM,
2003) for oboe performance. His primary teachers include Richard Killmer, David Weiss, and
Allan Vogel. He has performed as an oboe soloist with the New West Symphony, Heidelberg
Castle Festival Orchestra, Conejo Concerto Orchestra and the South Dakota Symphony, and
has substituted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and San
Diego Symphony.
Paul began his conducting career as the drum major of his elementary and junior high school
marching bands, and has since renounced the mace and plumes in favor of the baton he uses
to conduct the South Dakota Symphony’s Philharmonia youth orchestra.
One of Paul’s primary interests has been the traditional folk music of various cultures, and that
fascination is usually transparent in his original music. Some highlights in this area have been to
work closely with The Creekside Singers, Dakota Cedar Flute player Bryan Akipa, and to
improvise alongside Lebanese oud player Simon Shaheen.
In composition, Paul has received awards from the Young Composer’s Guild of the Music
Teachers Association of California, resulting in several premiers of his chamber and orchestral
music. In fact his first real conducting experience occurred during high school, when he
assembled an orchestra and conducted his original work “Fanfare and Overture” for the
association. Paul has been fortunate to conduct the SDSO’s Dakota Chamber Orchestra in the
premier of his orchestral suite “Mostly Slow Music.” He has also received composition
commissions from various organizations, including the South Dakota Symphony and the Young
Artists Ensemble theater group in California, and composes regularly for the Dakota Wind
Quintet. A recent compositional premiere occurred in the Fall of 2011: a sacred mini-cantata for
soprano, oboe, bass clarinet, and jazz rhythm section for Music Saint Croix in Stillwater, MN.
Paul is honored to have collaborated with Native Lakota and Dakota musicians. The result of
such collaborations was to compose two pieces of music for orchestra with Native musicians.
One composition featured The Creekside Singers from Pine Ridge, SD, and the other was a
concerto featuring Bryan Akipa, from Sisseton, on his self-made cedar flutes.
No stranger to the recording studio, Paul has recorded for various projects, including a Warner
Bros. film scoring session, a hip-hop orchestra, aspiring jazz/rock/fusion bands, and a spattering
of independent short films. However, many of his composition commissions were created and
completed in his small home studio.
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