Dr. Jim Taylor is Professor of Music and Director of Fine Arts at LeTourneau University, a Christian polytechnic university in Longview, TX. He earned his master’s degree from the University of Miami, where he fell in love with choral music under Dr. Donald Oglesby. In 1995 he founded the Jacksonville (FL) Children’s Chorus, an arts-based chorus that grew to over one hundred singers under his leadership and currently involves more than four hundred students per year.

Dr. Taylor was Narramore Scholar at the University of Alabama while he pursued his doctoral studies under Dr. John Ratledge. His analysis of the Shaw-Parker choral arrangements has been the subject of a dissertation and an article in the Choral Journal. It was during this time that he was invited to conduct the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra & Chorus in Ukraine on four occasions in works of Mozart, Handel, Haydn, Ravel, and Walton. He has continued to conduct major masterworks during his tenures at Kilgore College and at LeTourneau University, including Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the Mass in C Minor of Mozart, Handel’s Dixit Dominus, the Brahms and Fauré Requiems, the Poulenc Gloria, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, Carmina Burana, and others.

Dr. Taylor’s choral compositions can be found in the catalogs of Oxford University Press, Hinshaw Music, Roger Dean Music, Choristers Guild, and other publishers. Since 2015 he has focused on creating four choral/orchestral suites of the Cambridge Songs, eighty-three Latin poems near the end of an eleventh-century manuscript housed at the Cambridge University Library. He has conducted these twice at Carnegie Hall, at La Madeleine in Paris, and in Kyiv, Ukraine. His music can be explored at www.jtmusic.info.