Biography
Philadelphia area native Jay Krush has pursued a busy career as a performer, composer, arranger, teacher and conductor. A founding member of the Grammy Award-winning Chestnut Brass Company, he has performed on tuba and historical brasses with that ensemble in all fifty of the US states, Canada, the Caribbean, South America, Europe and Asia as well as two State Department tours to Central America. He has been heard with the Chestnut Brass Company on fourteen recordings on the Sony Classical, Naxos, Newport Classic, Polygram, Crystal, Albany and MusicMasters labels, performing on tuba (and ophicleide, serpent, bass sackbut, euphonium, and contrabass saxhorn). He has performed on the soundtrack album of Ken Burn’s film “The Civil War” on Nonesuch, “The Music of Harold Farberman” on Albany, and “I Remember Klezmer” with Susan and Elaine Watts. On screen performance on period instruments includes the film “Beloved” and the 6-part documentary “A House Divided” on PBS. Mr. Krush is also tubist with the Pennsylvania Ballet Orchestra and for many years played during the Summer in the orchestra at the Conductor’s Institute at Bard College. As an active freelance musician he has performed with a wide variety of ensembles, from Early Music Ensembles to Contemporary Music groups and in orchestras backing up a diverse array of performers including Mel Torme, Brian Wilson, Michael Bolton, Marvin Hamlisch, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. He also performs with Philadelphia’s Arcana New Music Ensemble as conductor and tubist.
As a composer Mr. Krush has written over seventy works, for orchestra, wind ensemble, chamber orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles and voice. He has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the American Composers Forum and others. As an arranger he has produced dozens of arrangements recorded by the Chestnut Brass Company as well as ballet scores for the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Royal Ballet of Flanders (Belgium). He has also reconstructed over thirty period wind band scores of works by early 19th Century African-American composers from Philadelphia.
Mr. Krush has served on the faculty of the Boyer College of Music at Temple University since 1982 as an Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer. He teaches tuba and euphonium and conducts the Contemporary Music Ensemble (which he founded in 1997) and the Tuba/Euphonium Ensemble. He has previously taught at the New School of Music and the Philadelphia College of the Performing Arts (now the University of the Arts). He holds a BM in Composition from the Eastman School of Music where he studied composition with Joseph Schwantner, Samuel Adler, and Warren Benson and tuba with Cherry Beauregard, and an MM in Performance from Northwestern University where he studied tuba with the Chicago Symphony’s Arnold Jacobs and composition with Alan Stout. He has pursued additional study at Yale University (Chamber Music-Yale Summer School for Music and Art), Philadelphia College of Performing Arts (Electronic Music), and Temple University (Boyer College of Music: Scoring for Film and Television, and the School of Radio, Television and Film: Animation).