ESP Biography



JULIAN GAU, Enthusiastic musician & aspiring conductor




Major: Music & Mathematics

College/Employer: Brown

Year of Graduation: 2019

Picture of Julian Gau

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Julian Gau is a musician of various fields and places – as conductor, composer, performer, and enthusiastic listener. Before the pandemic, his primary focus was conducting orchestras and musical theatre, having studied at Brown University. In January 2021, he will be starting a master’s degree in orchestral conducting at Boston Conservatory. He is passionate about finding and passing on the stories of the lives of all sorts of composers & musicians, including some really hipster ones. Other musical activities include playing the piano and cello, livestreaming music on Twitch, and engraving music in LilyPond. During other times, he enjoys novels, noodles, and time with friends.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

A14347: Voices of Years and Memories: The Lives and Music of Fanny Hensel and Florence Price in Splash 2020 (Nov. 14 - 15, 2020)
In the world of classical music, we tend to celebrate a narrow subset of the wide and diverse array of people who were creating and playing music. Specifically, a very white and male one. Let's talk about two artists: Fanny Hensel, a German pianist, composer, and sister to Felix Mendelssohn; and Florence Price, an American teacher, organist, and the first African-American woman to make it big as an orchestral composer. We'll learn about their lives and music, and how their circumstances affected the art they created. Aside from words and pictures, there will also be live performances of their piano music. Finally, some important questions that bring us to today: whose music do we perform, and on a greater level, whose stories do we tell?