Trevor Patricia Watkin is named after his grandmother, a fellow native of Southern California. A teacher since 1997, from 2013-2022 Trevor taught at Access Contemporary Music in Chicago, where he served first as Director of Operations and ultimately as Director of Artistic Activities. In 2019 he created the ACM Film Scoring Class, which is the only film scoring class in the country designed for secondary-aged students also given the opportunity to score for live, professional musicians for a public performance.
Trevor conducted Seth Boustead’s score for the film Dreaming Grand Avenue, produced by the Newcity Chicago Film Project, and the Sound of Silent Film Festival, produced by Access Contemporary Music, at the 2020 and 2022 Thirsty Ears Street Festivals. The Sound of Silent Film Festival also commissioned from him the premieres of five new scores for the films Liminal, My Son Thomas, Blackout Roulette, Frames, and Escape.
Trevor is a past recipient of the Joseph Jefferson Award for his score for the silent stage production The Black Duckling. He is also a past winner of the Houghton College Sacred Choral Composition Competition for his a cappella work Lullay, Mine Liking, written for the original cast of The Right Brain Project’s production of Stephen Gawrit’s Hammer.
Recent performances include a multi-state tour of his program Drag It Through the Garden, featuring works exclusively by Chicago Composers, at which he and pianist Peter Friesen gave the world premieres of Ezra Shuminas’s Andrew’s Theme and the final movement of Seth Boustead’s Sonata for Flute and Piano. Up next is Confident Lines In a Strange Sky, featuring nine works for chamber ensemble featuring six local San Diego musicians and seven guest musicians flown in from San Francisco, Chicago, and Cincinnati, with all four composers in attendance. Upcoming commissions include new works for flute and piano by Tatev Amiryan, William Jason Raynovich, and Regina Harris Baiocchi.
A past student of both Point Loma Nazarene University and University of Colorado at Boulder, Trevor has studied flute with Lory Lacy, Barbara Mullens Geier, Jill Coady, and Elizabeth McNutt; and composition with Phillip Keveren and Richard Toensing.
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