J.S. Bach - French Suite no. 1 in D minor, BWV 812

I. Allemande

Billy Traylor, harpsichord

J.S. Bach – French Suite no. 1 In D minor, BWV 812 - I. Allemande

Oboist, early music specialist, and musicologist Billy Traylor holds diplomas in oboe and bassoon performance from the University of New Orleans (BA 2001) and Northwestern State University of Louisiana (MM 2004). He was a doctoral student in early music at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he studied historical oboes with the late Washington McClain, and historical keyboards with Elisabeth Wright.

He is the Artistic Director of the Austin Baroque Orchestra and Chorus, a period-instrument ensemble he founded in 2011, and in which he plays oboe, recorder, and keyboard continuo when not conducting. He also performs regularly with La Follia Austin Baroque, the St. Cecilia Baroque Festival Orchestra, Texas Early Music Project, Orchestra of New Spain, American Baroque Opera Company, Dallas Bach Society, and other period- and modern-instrument ensembles in Texas and elsewhere.

As a musicologist, he is primarily interested in colonial music and culture, specifically that of 17th- and 18th-century Latin America and 18th-century New France.  He has also researched and written on the history and development of the oboe, music at the courts of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great, the music and lives of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Antoine Reicha, and the traditional music of Greece and the Aegean.  As an editor, he regularly produces performing editions of long-forgotten sacred works from Latin American cathedral and mission archives, and has also worked extensively upon the Manuscrit des Ursulines, the only extant music manuscript from colonial New Orleans.