Christopher Dylan Herbert is passionate about the transformational properties of music. As a singer, he aims to find truth and relationships in music. As an educator, he focuses on his students’ development and connections to music. As a person, he seeks to be a positive and peaceful, and to promote the value of music to society.
Herbert was born in New York to a family with many connections to the theatre. He began his musical journey at age nine when he started playing viola in school. His public music education, supplemented with extracurricular study, led to his participation in youth symphonies, string quartets, and musicals. After his voice changed, he began to study singing in addition to viola. He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, and it was there that he gained a love for ensemble singing and opera. During his twenties, he received a master’s degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University, and he pursued a number of careers in consulting, public relations, and non-profit management. Throughout these various employments, Herbert managed to simultaneously pursue a career in classical vocal music, which included apprenticeships and fellowships at prestigious young artist training programs, among them Aspen Music Festival, Music Academy of the West, Central City Opera, and Tanglewood.
In 2010, Herbert joined the quartet New York Polyphony, with whom he performed hundreds of concerts throughout the world until 2020. Two of the albums recorded with this group received Grammy® nominations in the Small Ensemble/Chamber Music category, and an additional record was a finalist for a Gramophone Award. His tenure in New York Polyphony deepened his appreciation for European music written before 1600, and it led him to pursue a doctorate in music at The Juilliard School. His doctoral studies focused on the music of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, about which he wrote his dissertation and several articles. His 2020 album, Voices in the Wilderness, highlighted the contributions of eighteenth-century female composers and received critical acclaim, most notably from NPR’s Morning Edition. Herbert is also part of a Getty Foundation-funded research team based at Winterthur focusing on the 1784 Ludwig Denig Manuscript.
Herbert is Vocal Area Coordinator and an associate professor at William Paterson University, a public institution in New Jersey. Herbert considers his work with his students to be the most significant experience of his life. He is proud to have reinvented the voice program at William Paterson, and to have worked closely with his colleagues to raise the profile and diversity of the vocal faculty. Starting in 2017, he introduced a regular practice of presenting staged works in his department, and he tripled student participation in vocal studies during a time of decreasing enrollments in higher education.
In addition to his teaching, Herbert performs opera, musical theatre, concerts, and recitals around the United States, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He is currently working with the composer Suzanne Farrin to develop the opera Macabéa, based on The Hour of the Star by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, for a premiere in São Paulo, Brazil in 2025. Significant recent performances include the development and premiere of Judd Greenstein’s A Marvelous Order, the presentation of Vivier’s Kopernikus in Buenos Aires, a debut concert at Lotte Concert Hall in Seoul, South Korea with pianist Kyung-Eun Na, and the mounting of his self-conceived WINTERIZE, a reimagining of Schubert’s Winterreise for outdoor audience with transistor radios, in New York and Weimar, Germany. Other notable engagements include Han Lash’s Desire at the Miller Theatre, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti at Tanglewood, concerts at the Cartagena International Music Festival in Colombia, John Cage's Renga with the San Francisco Symphony, the title role in Handel's Saul for Trinity Wall Street's Twelfth Night Festival, performances of Schubert with Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a Ginastera centennial celebration with the International Contemporary Ensemble, the title role in Pelléas et Mélisande with Floating Opera NY, Hannah-Before in Laura Kaminsky's As One with the Fry Street Quartet for American Opera Projects at BAM, Montresor in Stewart Copeland's The Cask of Amontillado with the American Modern Ensemble, the title role in The War Reporter at The Prototype Festival and Stanford LIVE, Henrik in A Little Night Music at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and collaborations with Mario Brunello, Jeremy Denk, Stefan Jackiw, and Gilbert Kalish, among others.
Herbert’s greatest musical influences include J.S. Bach, Mozart, Leontyne Price, Jacob Collier, Gabriel Kahane, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. He is a board member of The Plimpton Foundation. In his free time, he enjoys dancing and gardening. He lives in New York with his husband, conductor and pianist Timothy Long, and their dog Pumpkin.
Updated August 2023.