Dr. Justin Vickers

Research Interests & Areas

Dr. Justin Vickers, Distinguished Professor of Music, is a Benjamin Britten scholar and British music researcher.

As an American lyric tenor, I have been fortunate to sing alongside several great artists who have influenced my own work as a teacher in the voice studio. My international career has encompassed standard, contemporary, and world-premiere opera, oratorio, and recital work.

I am especially excited about the commercial release of my second solo album, Justin Vickers – the Poet's Echo: Songs of Benjamin Britten, John David Earnest, and Colin Matthews in October 2023 (Albany Records, TROY 1949), which includes several world-premiere recordings of Britten, Earnest, and Matthews.

Recital and Concert Repertoire
It has been a joy to sing world-premiere song cycles by composers including Colin Matthews, Zachary Wadsworth, Tony Solitro, John David Earnest, Thomas Schuttenhelm, Alexander Zhurbin, Martha Horst, and Roy Magnuson, as well as several upcoming premieres and projects with Alex Stephenson, Sid Richardson, and Timothy J. Bowlby.

I champion the creation of new vocal music. I am actively involved in commissioning and premiering new song cycles and bringing them to the concert hall and the recording studio. My vocal repertoire includes virtually all of Benjamin Britten's song cycles, alongside an ever-increasing number of major American and British song cycles.

Opera Librettos
After an enjoyable career on the operatic stage, I am currently hard at work writing and workshopping a number of opera librettos with American composers.

Musicology
Increasingly, I devote a great deal of my time to musicological research and writing. I am presently writing The Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts: A History of the Britten and Pears Era, 1948–1986 for The Boydell Press. I have edited and contributed to Benjamin Britten in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and Benjamin Britten Studies: Essays on An Inexplicit Art (The Boydell Press, 2016) with Vicki P. Stroeher, in addition to multiple published essays and chapters on British music, including my 2009 discovery and premiere of Britten's "Epilogue" to his Holocaust-inspired song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (in The Musical Times and Literary Britten: Words and Music in Benjamin Britten's Vocal Works).

My archival research focuses almost exclusively on Benjamin Britten's founding of the English Opera Group (1947) and the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts (1948); Musicology with a primary focus on the twentieth-century British Isles; the career and repertoire of tenor Peter Pears and his extensive commissions and premieres of new vocal works, as well as the influence of his seminal recordings of such works.

I am genuinely thrilled to work with advanced undergraduate and graduate students on independent studies and master's theses related to any of my areas of specialization.

Current Additional Projects
I am editing and contributing to Childhood and the Operatic Imaginary since 1900 with Joy H. Calico (Oxford University Press, forthcoming); editing and contributing to Elizabeth Maconchy in Context (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) with Lucy Walker; and with Philip Reed, I am editing the memoir of the first Festival Manager of the Aldeburgh Festival — Elizabeth Sweeting — alongside some 75 pieces of unpublished correspondence with Benjamin Britten, for which we offer rich contextualization (The Bittern Press, forthcoming).