Juli Nunlist

Juli Nunlist (1916 – 2006) received a B.A. in English Composition from Barnard College in 1940, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. In 1957, at the age of 40, she entered Manhattan School of Music as a composition major, and received her Bachelor’s degree in 1961 and her Master’s in 1964, studying with Vittorio Giannini, Ludmila Ulehla, and Nicholas Flagello. Her Spells is a choral setting of six poems by the English poet Kathleen Raine and was chosen for performance by the University of Kansas Concert Choir (Clayton Krehbiel conducting) at the Sixth Annual Symposium of Contemporary American Music, April 1964. In addition to Spells, her works include this string quartet, piano, choral, and chamber music, and a symphonic tone suite after Juan Ramon Jimenez’ prose poems, Platero and I.

Mrs. Nunlist was a member of ASCAP, the American Music Center and the American Women Composers, Inc., and was for fifteen years a member of the Cleveland Composers Guild. Much of her career was devoted to the teaching of music to dancers, dance teachers and choreographers in connection with the National Association for Regional Ballet at numerous Craft of Choreography conferences and workshops throughout the United States and Canada. She worked with Pauline Koner, Bella Lewitzky, Fernand Nault, Todd Bolender, Alexandra Danilova and Barbara Weisberger, and was personally commended for her work by the late George Balanchine. She designed and taught special courses in Music for Dancers and Dance Composition for the University of Akron’s first dance major program, which was initiated by Heinz Poll, and edited both Ann Hutchinson’s definitive work on movement notation, Labanotation (1970) as well as her published works, Your Move and A Teacher’s Guide to Your Move. She was a Trustee and faculty member of the Performing Arts School of Worcester, Massachusetts, and a part-time faculty member of Clark University.

This album is a commemoration of the musical life and works of Juli Nunlist, including music in the MMC recordings, and a modern recording of SPELLS and her string quartet.