James Touchi-Peters

James Touchi-Peters is an American composer, symphonic conductor, lyricist, pianist, jazz vocalist and record producer. A former child-prodigy orchestra conductor, he has been a frequent guest-conductor of symphony orchestras in the United States, Canada and Europe; and is probably best known professionally for his nine-year tenure as Principal Conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra in Minneapolis, from 1992 through 2001. Under the name Touchi (pronounced "TOO-shee") he also performs as a jazz singer and composer, and his first jazz vocal album, Nights in Manhattan, was released by Logan Park Records on July 16, 2013.

Touchi-Peters was also the founder of the now-defunct Netropolitan Club, an online social network for the wealthy that received worldwide media attention when it launched in the fall of 2014; it folded after three months.

Touchi-Peters is a first-generation American, born to a Romanian mother and an Albanian father. He was born and raised in Red Wing, Minnesota, where his father owned a soda fountain and candy store. His unusual hyphenated surname is from birth and not marriage, stemming from a bureaucratic error made at Ellis Island when his father emigrated to the United States. (His father changed it to Peters through common usage; Touchi-Peters claims he did not know of his full legal surname until he was thirteen years old.)

He showed prodigious musical ability as a child, as both a pianist and a cellist. When he was twelve, a middle-school music teacher invited him to conduct the school orchestra; not only was he physically a natural, but both Touchi-Peters and the instructor realized he could read an orchestra score without ever being shown how. He spent the following summer in Europe studying conducting with Vanco Cavdarski, music director of the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra (where his uncle was the principal trombonist). At sixteen he was hired as music director of the adult civic orchestra in his hometown; and at 18 he conducted the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. By the age of twenty he had performed all the Beethoven symphonies from memory.

Touchi-Peters attended the University of Miami School of Music specifically to study conducting with Frederick Fennell, who had previously mentored his cousin, percussionist Mitchell Peters. He tested out of almost the entirety of the school's music theory program, needing to take only the two most advanced classes to complete the curriculum, which he did in one year. He studied composition there with Alfred Reed and shared a stand in the double-bass section of the university orchestra with Will Lee. He served as Fennell's personal assistant and subsequently was appointed Assistant Conductor of the University of Miami Symphony. He left the school after two years when Fennell told him they had nothing left to teach him.

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