Joël-François Durand has accepted a new appointment as director of the School of Music, a three-year term effective on July 1, 2025. He has served as acting director of the School since February 2022.
College of Arts and Sciences Dean Dianne Harris and Divisional Dean for the Arts Gabriel Solis announced the appointment March 7 in a joint letter emailed to School of Music faculty and staff.
“We are confident that Joël will continue to provide excellent leadership and ask that you join us in supporting his efforts,” they wrote.
The culmination of an internal search process that began in Fall 2024, the effort to identify the next School of Music director was led by a committee co-directed by Jeffrey Fracé, associate professor at the School of Drama; and Peter Nicolas, the William L. Dwyer Endowed Chair at the School of Law and adjunct professor of Music History. After issuing a survey to School of Music faculty and staff, the committee held listening sessions for tenured faculty, untenured faculty, staff, and graduate students and took direct commentary from School of Music faculty before making final recommendations to the deans. The committee issued a public summary of the process they followed in arriving at their final recommendations.
Feedback on Durand’s leadership since 2022 was overwhelmingly positive, the committee said in its report: “Our listening sessions began with an open-ended prompt inquiring how people felt about the current climate in the School of Music. Happily, the responses were overwhelmingly positive, generally assessing the School to be functioning better than at any other time in memory. Several respondents noted a feeling of consistency and stability that is much needed at this time. One long-time staff member noted, ‘I have never seen morale as good as it is now,’ and a tenured faculty member described the current faculty as ‘the most communicative in memory.’”
A member of the School of Music composition faculty since 1991, Durand also served as associate director of the School from 2002 to 2022, supervising the advising office and helping students resolve issues regarding grading or other academic issues. As interim and acting director of the School of Music, Durand led the School through the aftermath of the sudden death of former director JoAnn Taricani in February 2022, which occurred as the School was finding its footing in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Under his leadership the School of Music has completed several successful searches for tenure-track faculty positions, undertaken a comprehensive reassessment of the School and its programs, and is nearing the completion of a successful fundraising campaign for the first major upgrades to the Music Building since its construction in 1951.
Durand's compositions include works for solo instruments and ensembles including numerous commissioned works for significant ensembles worldwide. Recent projects include Tropes de : Bussy, a work for large orchestra based on some of Debussy’s piano Préludes, commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra in 2019. His composition Geister, schwebende Geister, written for faculty violist Melia Watras in 2020, won first prize at the 2021 European Composer Competition organized by the Franz Schubert Konservatorium, Vienna, Austria, in the Category Chamber Music.
Besides being an inventor of large-scale music works, Durand is also an inventor of audio hardware. In 2010, he designed and started commercial production of an audio tonearm for record players called the Talea, followed by development of three further models, the Telos, the Kairos, and the Tosca, all aimed at consumers of high-end audio reproduction systems. For his work at his company Durand Tonearms LLC, he was made a University of Washington Entrepreneurial Fellow in 2010.
In issuing its final report, the director search committee acknowledged some of the challenges facing the School now and in the near future, among them the impacts of potential budget cuts at the state or federal level; future funding decisions impacting TA-ships and other funding sources for graduate students; the shortage of office space in the Music Building for temporary and part-time faculty, and “tension between desires to expand or enrich programmatic offerings and the concern that already limited resources are likely to face further compression.”
Even so, School of Music faculty received news of Durand’s appointment with enthusiasm, responding with a volley of congratulations and positive emails to the deans’ announcement.
“You’ve proven yourself the right man for the job,” wrote Professor Shannon Dudley, Ethnomusicology, a sentiment seemingly shared by a majority of his colleagues, who congratulated Durand at the March faculty meeting with a loud, sustained, resounding round of applause.
"I am grateful for the support you have provided in the last few years; none of what we accomplished could have happened without your efforts and dedication to the future of our School," Durand stated. "I look forward to our work together in the years ahead!"
Read the Search Committe Report