Brad Wells
Founder and Director
Roomful of Teeth founder and director Brad Wells is a conductor, singer, and composer who serves on the faculty of the Department of Music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
At Williams, Wells directs the choral program, oversees and teaches studio voice, and leads courses in conducting, arranging and voice science and style. With Roomful of Teeth he has led premieres of works by Judd Greenstein, Rinde Eckert, Brian Simalchik, Caroline Shaw, Eric Dudley and Avery Griffin. Wells has held conducting positions at Yale University, Trinity College, University of California at Berkeley and California State University, Chico, and has directed choirs of all ages. His ensembles have performed throughout North and South America and Europe. In 2007 Wells commissioned and led the Williams Concert Choir in the world premiere in Palestrina, Italy, of Judd Greenstein’s Lamenting, a work based on Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s settings of Hebrew letters from his Lamentations. In 2006 he assisted with the world premiere of Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for tape, testimony and voice in Cape Town, South Africa, and conducted the U.S. premiere at the Celebrate Brooklyn Festival in New York City. A champion of Estonian choral music, he has led the U.S. premieres of works by numerous Estonian composers including Raimo Kangro, Jüri-Ruut Kangur, and Lembit Veevo. He has lectured and published articles on the physiology and acoustics of non-classical vocal styles and the role of singing in film. As a singer he has performed and recorded with such ensembles as Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (under Nicholas McGegan and Philip Brett) and the California Choral Company (under William Dehning). In 1998 he was the recipient of the Aidan Kavanagh Achievement Prize from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. Wells received the Doctor of Musical Arts (2005), Yale University; Master of Musical Arts (1998), Yale University; Master of Music (1986), University of Texas at Austin; B.A. (1984), Principia College.
