Christian Guebert is a composer and music educator from Orange, California. His commissioned secular and sacred works include published and award-winning pieces, settings, orchestrations for instrumental and choral ensembles, and concert-length compositions. Christian’s music aims for immediacy, idiomatic performing style, and sonic variance and depth. His experience with percussion is a factor in the liveliness and spirited nature of much of his output. He composes in all acoustic media, focusing on choir, handbell ensemble, wind band, orchestra, and chamber ensembles. Recent scoring experience includes a published orchestration of a choral piece. He regularly organizes concert series and gives workshops and residencies for his composition and directing work. He has directed music throughout this country and in Europe on music tours, having taken private study in choral, wind band, orchestra, and handbell conducting. He has taught university classes and lessons in theory, composition, ear training, singing, piano, counterpoint, orchestration, arranging, percussion, handbells, conducting, technology, and sacred music.
Recent stuff:
on faculty of the 2016 and 2018 National Seminar of Handbell Musicians of America
Christian earned a Ph.D. in composition from the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music (2020) where he served as Teaching Fellow, a Master of Music degree in composition from Cal State University Fullerton, and a Parish Music Certification and Bachelor of Arts degree from Concordia University, Irvine.
Recent works include “Voyaging,” a concert-length cycle of Walt Whitman sea poetry for choir, harp, and large handbell ensemble which incorporates “The Untold Want,” the prizewinning piece of the nationwide 2017 Pacific Chorale Young Composers Competition, performed by the John Alexander Singers. “Voyaging” premiered March 2019 as a culmination of a composer residency with Choral Arts Initiative in Orange County, CA.
In 2020 he received the inaugural G.O.L.D. (Graduate of the Last Decade) Alumni Achievement Award from Concordia University Irvine.
Christian is the Director of Music Ministries at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Orange where he regularly gives carillon recitals on the tower chime, and an adjunct professor and handbell director at Concordia University Irvine where he has served as Composer-in-Residence. He lives with his clarinetist wife Megan and baby daughter Evangeline.