Kerry Turner

Biography

Kerry Turner is an American horn player and composer whose career spans performance, composition, and pedagogy across more than four decades and forty countries. Born in1960 in Kingsville, Texas, he demonstrated exceptional musical gifts from childhood, winning a composition contest at age ten and performing the alto part in a production of Handel’s Messiah the same year.

Turner’s formal training took him from Baylor University to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where he joined the Kammer Wind Quintet, winners of a prize at the Artists International Competition that earned the ensemble a recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. In 1982, he received a Fulbright Scholarship to study with the celebrated horn soloist Hermann Baumann at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart. His competition record reflects the highest level of international achievement: he placed in the finals of the Geneva International Horn Competition and won the Bronze Medal at the Prague Spring International Solo Horn Competition.
Turner’s orchestral career includes tenures as co-principal horn of the Gürzenich Orchestra (Cologne Opera) and principal horn of the Luxembourg Philharmonic, from which he retired in 2020. From 1985 to 2024, he was a member of the world-renowned American Horn Quartet, and since 2002 has performed with Kristina Mascher-Turner as the Virtuoso Horn Duo.

As a composer, Turner has received commissions from the Detroit Symphony, US Air Force “Heritage of America” Band, Luxembourg Philharmonic, Brass Ensemble of the Symphony Orchestra of Lyon, and the Fredener International Music Festival in Germany, among many others. His compositions have earned multiple prizes from the International Horn Society as well as The Swiss Prize in 2023 and the IBLA Prize in Sicily. Kerry holds an Honorary Membership in the International Horn Society, one of the field’s most distinguished recognitions. His works have been recorded and performed by musicians from the New York, Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago symphony orchestras. His music draws on British Isles folk traditions, Mexican influence, Western American idioms, and the sounds of North Africa and the Arab world.

Turner has served as guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Oslo, Academy of Fine Arts in Hong Kong, and the Winterthur Hochschule für Musik. He currently resides in Brussels.

SPECIALTIES:
Music composition

LANGUAGES:
English, German, French, Luxembourgish