Jay Lyon is a composer, violinist and pianist living in San Francisco.
He won the SF Conservatory’s Jim Highsmith Award for orchestral composition in 1992, an NEA grant in jazz composition in 1993, the first prize and chamber music award of the Delius Contest in 1994, and a Subito Grant from the American Composer’s Forum in 2005. His Concerto Grosso was premiered by Kent Nagano conducting the Berkeley Symphony; his Violin Concerto, Trois Chansons Françaises, and Cantata on Texts by Gerard Manley Hopkins by the SF Concerto Orchestra on the Old First Concert series. As music director of Unity Christ Church, San Francisco from 1997 to 2008, he led premieres of his 4 church cantatas. In 2006 his Meditation and Dirge for harp and cello was performed at the American Harp Society National Conference, held in San Francisco. In 2007 Nicole Paiement’s Blueprint contemporary music series at the S.F. Conservatory programmed his Voyelles and featured him as guest lecturer. In 2010 the Soli Deo Gloria chorus and orchestra under Allen Simon premiered his Two Songs For My Father in Palo Alto and Alameda. His 4 from the War for harp and cello was performed at the National Association of Composers concert in Palo Alto in 2011. On the same series, his Easter Prelude for flute, cello and piano cello appeared in 2013, his Trio for piano, violin, and cello in 2014, and his song cycle, Morning Words and Litany of Thanksgiving in 2015. A CD, Voyelles: Music of Jay Lyon, released in 2007, presents compositions ranging in style from hip-hop to chamber music and art song. His second CD, Ain’t Gonna Study War No More, was released in 2021.
Besides music, Jay has devoted time and energy to the antiwar and other social justice movements over the last 25 years. His CD, “Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” featured works on war and peace, and included this explanation of the antiwar movement’s importance and how he became involved:
Why an antiwar CD?
The US has been at war my whole life, usually in a far-off land, smaller, weaker, poorer, not attacking us or any other country. Yet most Americans hardly notice the nonstop violence. Why not? Politicians and media tell us we're threatened, so that our aggression becomes self-defense, or they focus on a leader whose crimes we must stop. (Often that leader was our good friend and client at the height of his crimes.) Bombing and torture get lost in a haze of justifications. The term, “imperialism,"--taking over another country for our benefit--doesn't appear in the news. But imperialism, always craving loot and location, is our system's oxygen--and for most of us, just as invisible. Those who point it out--Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Michael Hastings, Gaza protesters—risk getting locked up or killed.
Can a CD prompt change? Maybe not directly; music (as Auden wrote of poetry) makes nothing happen. But the better world it shows us suggests an ideal: good composition models justice. If I give each element introduced into my piece—each distinctive rhythm, motive, or texture—its due, then these elements can bloom, assume their rightful place in the whole. Abandon them prematurely, deny them a chance to grow and link, and the piece becomes a litter of false starts. This is a failure of justice. Successful composition embodies a virtue essential to political progress.
When I wrote my antiwar pieces I was music director at Unity Christ Church in San Francisco, a job I started in 1997. After 9/11, the US stepped up its violence against the Middle East, and I plunged into protest. A phrase I'd heard forever, "imperialist aggression,"--that funny phrase out of Pravda, certainly never applicable to my country--suddenly fit. My job at Unity gave me a platform to speak out and to perform music, my own and others'. For vocal works I drew on sacred texts. They suited church services and, being in the public domain. spared me copyright problems.