Get to know John-Paul

What have you been up to?
"I graduated from the University of Maryland in 2019. I'm currently working as a software engineer at a mid-size firm in Maryland."
How long have you been singing in choirs?
"I didn’t take choir seriously until high school but I think technically I’ve been in a choir of some kind or another since like fourth grade."
What is your favorite musical memory?
"Oh man, this is a hard question. I have so many. I think it’s a tie between 2015 Maryland All-State and doing the Brahms Requiem with BSO last spring. They were both totally crazy and unlike anything I’d ever done before and also extremely rewarding."
Do you have any special talents or interests outside of music?
"Obviously, given my schooling answer above, I've always been really interested in computers and the more logic/philosophy side of math and language. I'm also something of a politics and law nerd. I try to read a lot too but it's hard to keep up during the school year.”
What’s your favorite book?
“Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. (Yeah, I’m that guy.)"
Who is your favorite composer?
"James MacMillan. His music is ridiculously demanding but he’s also very good at capturing the spirit of a text in a way that feels right to me, and I have to say I’ve grown to really like the Scottish flavor of it all with the crazy ornaments everywhere and everything. I also really like the way he melds traditional texts and forms with a far more modern set of musical tricks."
Who's your favorite non-classical musical artist?
"I've been listening to a lot of The National recently but the single band I've been a fan of for the longest and always loved is Radiohead. So I'm gonna go with Radiohead."
What song have you not been able to stop listening to?
"Fake Empire” by The National.
What were you doing in the summer when you were in middle school?
"To tell you the truth I have no idea. You know that scene in Inside Out where the people are walking around destroying memories that don’t need to be saved? I think that’s what happened to most of middle school."
What's your favorite sports team?
"The Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes, because I did a search for ridiculous sports team names and this came up."
What's your favorite thing about singing in Lux?
"Because it’s a hand-selected and volunteer group, everybody’s friends and the atmosphere is really relaxed but everyone’s committed to it and takes it seriously."
What's your favorite song you've sung with Lux?
"Pärt’s Nunc Dimittis, because I love the text and think it’s an excellent setting of it, and because I think it’s one of the more successful uses of Pärt’s trademark style"
Who’s cooler: John Lennon or Mick Jagger?
"Mick Jagger, because John Lennon wrote “Imagine” and Mick Jagger did not."
What's the most interesting fact about you?
"Most interesting fact about me is a huge number of people read something I wrote in 8th grade about iPads because it got linked on a popular Apple-centric website (actually my favorite one still)."

John-Paul Teti (J-P to those who know him) has been with Lux since the beginning, ten seasons. Despite hanging around the performing arts building often enough that people thought he was a music major, he graduated from the University of Maryland with a degree in Computer Science and a minor in Linguistics. In Summer 2018, he worked as a research assistant on a computational linguistics study on child language acquisition. He was a member of the UMD University Chorale and the more select UMD Chamber Singers, and performed with them alongside the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra. When not doing computery, linguisticsy, or musicy things, he can be found on Twitter. (Probably.)

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