Jay Weigel

Jay Weigel is a composer, producer, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, and contractor for film, television, recordings, and concerts.

From 1998 to 2001, he worked as an orchestrator, assistant conductor, and head music preparatory for composer Terence Blanchard. From 1985 to 1991 he was Lecturer of Composition and Orchestration at Xavier University in New Orleans. Weigel helped organize the Louisiana Composers Guild, and served as the co-chairman of the Louisiana Music Commission from 1998-2004.

Weigel has served as Executive Director of the Contemporary Arts Center, CAC, in New Orleans since 1996. Prior to this appointment, Weigel was Music Director of the CAC for eleven years.

In 1998 Weigel premiered his contemporary opera Ash Wednesday to New Orleans audiences at the opening event of the Faulkner Festival. Weigel’s post-modern opera, Dawn in the Floating City, was presented at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts in 2002. The opera examines the dialogue between the communities that make up the culture of New Orleans. For his third opera, 7 Days in Paradise, Weigel collaborated with Harold Sylvester. This work was premiered in 2007 and was based on the Hurricane Katrina experiences of artist Jeffery Cook.

The Ogden Museum of Southern Art commissioned his fourth opera, The River May Cry, featuring a successful integration of European classical music with blues, gospel, jazz and African music, and utilizing a diverse array of musicians to perform this original work. An oratorio derived from the opera was recorded and released in 2004. In 2004, the St. Louis Cathedral commissioned Weigel’s Mass of Pope John Paul II, who died two weeks before the premiere of the work in 2005. In 2008, the University of Southern Mississippi commissioned and performed his work Renaissance for orchestra and choir.

In 2012, the majority of the artists in the exhibition "Spaces: Antenna, The Front, Good Children Gallery" at the CAC demanded for Weigel to resign from his position as the executive director. Many of the artists pulled their work from the exhibition in protest, citing that Weigel has a "conflict of interest and is not qualified to run the institution."

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