A celebration of female organ composers of the early 20th century
Joy-Leilani specializes in organ repertoire composed by women and, through her work with the Boulanger Initiative, advocates for music composed by women through performance, research, education, and commissions. She has lived in France and focuses especially on early 20th-century French organ music by female composers, such as Joséphine Boulay, Mel Bonis, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Jeanne Demessieux, and Marie-Véra Maixandeau.
Joy-Leilani Garbutt is Director of Music at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, San Francisco and co-founder of the Boulanger Initiative. Her advocacy of women composers has been recently featured in The New York Times.
Joy-Leilani is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and spent 2018-19 in France pursuing research on early 20th-century French organ music by female composers, particularly Joséphine Boulay, Mel Bonis, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Jeanne Demessieux, Marie-Véra Maixandeau, and Henriette Puig-Roget. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, and has recently been a student of Dr. Jeremy Filsell and Sophie-Veronique Cauchefer-Choplin. In the spring of 2018 Joy-Leilani co-founded the Boulanger Initiative, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting music composed by women through performance, education, commissions, and advocacy.
She holds a Master of Education degree from The Harvard Graduate School of Education and a Master of Music in organ performance from Northwestern University, where she served as Organ Scholar for the Alice Millar Chapel. In addition to solo recitals in the U.S. and France, Joy-Leilani has performed with the New England Youth Ensemble in Australia, England, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Africa.
Ms. Garbutt's work has been profiled multiple times in The New York Times and Washington Post.