To speak with Joseph C Phillips Jr (b. 1967), and to hear his music, you would imagine an optimistic philosopher, or a student of ancient religious texts. While philosophy and ancient texts are of interest and influence, in truth, this new music composer is more a scholar of feeling – a conduit of emotional imagination, manifested through a set of composed music that is at the same time new as it is familiar.

The compositions of Joseph C Phillips Jr and his ensemble Numinous – featured on four recordings The Grey Land (New Amsterdam Records, 2020), Changing Same (New Amsterdam Records, 2015), Vipassana  (Innova recordings, 2009), and The Music of Joseph C. Phillips Jr. (Numen Records, 2003) – defy any classic genre definitions. Phillips calls the style, mixed music; a term inspired by mixed race people who have traits and characteristics that come from each individual parent, from the melding of the two, and their own uniqueness. Mixed music is an organic fusing of various elements from many different influences, forming compositions that are personal, different, and new.

A self-proclaimed “late bloomer” in the composing scene, Phillips is no newcomer to musical accomplishment, starting with his undergraduate music degree from the University of Maryland-College Park, later earning a master’s in composition from Stephen F. Austin University studying with Dr. Stephen Lias. After undergraduate studies Phillips moved to Bellevue, WA in the Pacific Northwest to teach high school music. Teaching International Baccalaureate (IB) Music and leading an award-winning band program at Interlake High School, he earned an Educator of the Year award from the city of Bellevue, WA near Seattle. Phillips nurtured his growing interest in composing his own music and joined the Seattle Young Composers Collective (now called the Degenerate Art Ensemble) as a performer and composer. He was unable, however, to ignore the temptation to do something more with his own music and so moved to New York City to explore his own musical dreams. “I was following my passion,” Phillips says. “I didn’t want to wake up when I’m 60 and regret not at least trying to share what I had to say through composition.”

While in New York City, in the year 2000, inspired by many other key figures in new music, Phillips formed his own unique ensemble Numinous. A flexible ensemble that is part chamber orchestra, part contemporary alternative group, Numinous organically fuses elements of contemporary classical, various musics from around the world, jazz, and popular music performance practices and styles. The word numinous refers more to the feeling of awe and wonder that people can experience in many ways, not solely religious. Phillips wants his music to take listeners on a journey that is simultaneously outside of themselves, yet resonating deeply within; a journey that is both familiar and unlike any other they’ve experienced before. In creating something new, he hopes to create a sense of mystery, wonder, and beauty that challenges, refreshes, and enlightens listeners.

Phillips’s compositional technique is not limited or defined by any one genre but rather it is an amalgamation transmuted into a singular and individual style he calls mixed music. His achievements in composition have been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, NPR, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, The New Yorker, and many others; and he has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a MAP Fund grant, a Composing in the Wilderness Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council Arts Fund award, NewMusic USA project grant, a American Composers Forum Jerome Foundation grant for New Music, a Meet the Composers Creative Connections grant, an American Music Center CAP grant, two Live Music for Dance commission grants, and two Puffin Foundation grants. In addition to the worldwide performances of his works, including by the San Francisco Symphony, GRAMMY-nominated pianist Simone Dinnerstein, pianist Lara Downes, a Composer Portrait at the Wild Shore Music Festival in Alaska, and at the Steve Reich Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, new works have been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, the Kaufman Center and the Ecstatic Music Festival, Maryland Opera Studio, pianist Lara Downes, violinist Curtis Stewart, the NextNOW Fest, the Neighborhood Classics Concert Series for Face the Music, The Crossing choir, Dave Douglas and the Festival of New Trumpet Music, Concrete Temple Theatre, the St. Olaf College Band, the St. Olaf College Jazz Band, the University of Maryland Wind Ensemble, the Lamont Jazz Orchestra at the University of Denver, the University of Utah Percussion Studio, Adelphi University Guitar Ensemble, the Fieldston School, Edisa Weeks and the Delirious Dance Company, Take Dance Company, Maffei Dance Company, and a number of other musicians and ensembles. His music can be heard on four Numinous recordings, conducted by Phillips, and on The Crossing's Grammy-nominated finalist recording Carols After a Plague and Lara Downes This Land.

In addition to his many composer pursuits, Phillips is, for more than 20 years in NYC, a full-time elementary public school music teacher at PS 321 in the Park Slope section of brownstone Brooklyn, where he teaches kindergarteners-and now also first graders-how to sing pop songs from 1980s, how to recognize major, minor, augmented, and diminished chords, the different instrument families, music notation, how to compose, and to have fun with music.