Who is Tony Payne?

Tony Payne received formal education in music at three respected schools of music (Wheaton College, Bowling Green State University, Northwestern University). But the obsession began several years earlier when he confounded his piano teacher by ending his juvenilia in a different key than where it began. When the time for college approached, Wheaton Dean and future employer Harold Best said his gospel cantatas were full of grammatical errors, but that needn’t be a deterrent.

Since then, composer Tony Payne has spent many years refining his art and deciding which rules of musical grammar could be broken. (He learned to break some rules for the joy of it.) He has composed large works for band and orchestra, and dozens of smaller works for voices and instruments. He is a committed eclectic, celebrating the sheer abundance of quality music in any genre. He has written Christian contemporary songs, pop songs, art songs, choral music, experimental music, music for the stage and even some commercial music. He loves having occasions to compose for and stories to write about. He is a lyricist for many of his own vocal pieces, and is skilled at setting Scripture to music for congregational singing.

Tony Payne has had a distinguished career as Director of the Conservatory of Music at Wheaton College and as General Manager of the Artist Series at Wheaton College. He is a life-long church musician, and all of his professional experiences in the church and concert hall have become informants to his work as a composer.\

Tony Payne’s Music has been widely performed, probably as far away as Moscow, Russia. More recently, his Departures: Four Songs on Texts by Malcolm Muggeridge was performed at the historic American Church in Paris, France. Currently, he is completing a band composition for the Baylor School Band in Chattanooga.