About Joseph James
This website provides an introduction to the music of Joseph James with information about recordings and forthcoming performances, and with details of how to order existing recordings.
The music of Joseph James is the fruit of a long-standing collaboration between Stanley Joseph Seeger and Francis James Brown. Both composers in their own right, they met in Florence in the early 1950s while studying with Luigi Dallapiccola.
Their recorded works include the film score for Priest of Love, a film biography of D.H.Lawrence directed by Christopher Miles, Sketches from The Scarlet Letter, an opera based on the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Concerto for 3 Bouzoukis and orchestra, Requiem after J.S.Bach, Wanderer Fantasy after Schubert and Fantasie after Schumann.
Go to the features page to see details of the new recording After Rachmaninov.
ANNOUNCEMENT
Francis James Brown, one of the two partners who make up Joseph James, died in London on January 18th, 2008.
Jim Brown was born on October 26th, 1925, in Rochester, New York, where he studied at the Eastman School of Music under its director, Howard Hanson. He received two Fulbright awards to travel to Florence, where he was a composition pupil of Luigi Dallapiccola. He was an accomplished pianist and a prolific composer of songs, orchestral, chamber and operatic music, showing great musical sensibility.
His collaboration with Stanley J. Seeger, a fellow-pupil of Dallapiccola’s, began in the 1950s, and as Joseph James they wrote the score for the film Priest of Love in 1981. Their joint compositions include the opera The Scarlet Letter and the Requiem after J.S. Bach among other pieces.
Jim Brown was actively involved in the recording of After Rachmaninov, released in January 2009, and the works in progress at the time of his death will be completed by his partner in composition.