Dr. Gary Funk

Dr. Gary Funk is currently retired from university teaching having spent his career as a choral conductor, voice instructor, composer and author.

MUSIC COMPOSITIONS

• Eleven Poems of Brian William Taylor (co-author: Brian William Taylor) – paperback (medium high voice/medium low voice) is available for purchase at amazon.com

• No Greater Love (co-authors: Edward Morgan and Sylvia Funk), the two- volume paperback is available for purchase at amazon.com:

Volume I – Script

Volume II – Music

• Oscar, the Flying Boy – a three-act musical about an autistic child

• Ruth – a two-act opera

• Requiem for Native America (based on the words of Chief Black Elk) – a large work for choir, baritone solo, Indian drum, and full orchestra

• Eight Italian and German Art Songs (modern harmonizations)

RECORDINGS

The New Big Sky Singers (1999) and Fifty Years Ago Today (2020)

No Greater Love (2017)

Oscar, the Flying Boy (in progress)

Vocal Jazz Reunion

BOOKS

• Secrets for Great Singing: John L. Lester – Life and Pedagogy (co-author: Robert Hoyem) – paperback available for purchase at amazon.com.

• U.S. Crisis: Education, the Arts and Society (co-author: Eric Funk). The e-book available through amazon.com

• Ruth – a screenplay

• A Manual for Singers – compilation of voice teaching strategies to improve singing techniques

Primarily deeply educated in classical music and great books, he grew to love passionately the music of the music master-composers and the remarkable writings of the world’s historically best authors.

It is from the study of great works of music – rehearsing them and performing them often more than once – that he developed a deep reverence for their Art. It was partly through these explorations that his compositional voice emerged. His harmonic, melodic, rhythmic language and formal structures hearken back to musical ideas that moved him and humanity profoundly. He believes that there is something in human beings that longs for music that profoundly and clearly parallels – walks alongside – the human condition, thus framing the meaning of human experiences for perception.

His reading of the great books has deeply informed his writing skill. Finding just the right words to say something insightful in its daring, honest in its forthrightness and truthful in its content has been inspired by artful writing offered to us by the likes of Dostoevsky, Joyce, Rand, Tolstoy, Dickens, Shakespeare, Santayana, Wordsworth, Akhmatova, Frost, Homer and Hugo among others.

His goal as a composer and writer is to present honesty and authenticity. His works move him when he creates them and, thus, have the capacity to open the emotional receptors of listeners/readers and make them more vulnerable to and aware of their own realities.

Thoughtful creative works have the potential to compose the experiences for those engaged in focused moments of perception. Excellent creative output ought to change people as they read literature or hear music. If people aren’t somehow modified as a result, what is the point? Participants in reading eloquent writing or listening to powerful music may become enthralled and moved powerfully and thus have aesthetic experiences. If creative works consistently cause aesthetic experiences in many people over time, history may dare, someday, put a capital letter "A" on the word "art" as a descriptor of those works. Art, however, presents such a high pinnacle that Art is nearly unobtainable. That is what makes Art such a privileged category. All that can be stated here is that Dr. Funk brings all he can bear to move people to feel something about life as a result of their participation in his writing or music. If his creations succeed, he must be pleased; if the works don't succeed, he will continue to create music and literature in his chase of excellence.

Dr. Funk’s musical diet, over the years, has not been entirely restricted to classical music. He performs and records regularly with the New Big Sky Singers – a male quartet that has produced two albums of folk, country-western, jazz, Irish and rock n' roll music:

For more information about how to obtain his music, publications and recordings, please send an email to: sylvele@aol.com