Roger Evans’s biography of the Catalan composer Xavier Montsalvatge was published by Pendragon Press on March 20, and he is now at work on a book about George Perle that is based on extensive interviews of Perle by the Yale Oral History of American Music. He thus combines the work of a musician with that of a writer, informed by extensive activities as performer at pipe organ and harpsichord, choral conductor, teacher, researcher, scholar of liturgy, editor, administrator, and highly engaged observer.
Roger Evans was trained in music school as a performer (being one of the earliest recipients of the Bodky Prize while still a student in the Yale School of Music) and in graduate school as a musicologist (when he was Gustave Reese‘s research assistant and last Ph.D.). He also pursued post-graduate studies in English and comparative literature under Helaine Newstead and Harry Mooney. While working as a practical musician — especially as organist and choirmaster of some of the leading Catholic liturgical-music programs in the eastern United States — he has taught at the City University of New York and the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a writer, editor, and new-media specialist at BMG Classics and Sony Classical. He was United States publicist for Angel/EMI Classics/Virgin Classics. He is currently Editor at the Thornwillow Press. At the beginning of February of this year, he became Director of Music for the Church of Notre Dame and the Columbia University Catholic Ministry.
An NDEA Fellow for three years, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow three times, he also received study grants from the Smithsonian Institution and the Association for Cultural Exchange. Through it all, he has been writing and speaking in a wide variety of forums, both popular and specialized. This site is meant to reflect much of that ardent engagement with music and allied arts, literature, and media, in all of which practice has fed thought, and writing has both chronicled and informed practice. His book Music and Power inhabits some of the same territory, as does Amalarius of Metz and the Singing of the Carolingian Offices within a specific historical period.
Roger Evans, based in New York, has often worked in recent years to promote major composers through imaginative use of media and has also worked as Managing Director of the Hampsong Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Thomas Hampson to forward the performance and study of song. He is a partner in Fleur de Lis Recordings, which has recently released a restored recording, on two CDs, of the 1937 Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
He is an active teacher of harpsichord-playing and is engaged in a series of solo recitals on that instrument in New York. Late 2011 saw the release of a solo CD on the Thornwillow label, In the Italian Manner, of European harpsichord music in an Italian style, whether or not by an Italian composer.
Besides his many music projects, both applied and literary, Roger Evans cultivates a special interest in the social and cultural history of the diverse nationalities under the Spanish state. He lived in the Province of Barcelona for two years and maintains an especially lively relationship with the Catalan language and culture. He recently appeared in the illuminating documentary about Montsalvatge, Mig violí, una butaca i un piano (A half-size violin, a piano, and a concert-hall chair).
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