Welcome to the homepage of T. J. Turner, DMA

Dr. T. J. Turner, tenor, was named one of Memphis’s Top 20 Under 35 of 2023. He received positive reviews of his “solid performances” in his professional debut as The Doctor in The Handmaid’s Tale with GLOW Lyric Theatre: Opera Wire described his “crystalline high tenor” as “delightful to listen to.”

Dr. Turner performed in Kristin Chenoweth’s My Love Letter to Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York, NY. Notable roles include Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, William Barfée in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Enoch Snow in Carousel, and the Baker in Into the Woods. His operatic credits include the title roles in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito and Bizet’s Le docteur miracle. Other appearances include Sam in Susannah and Carlo in the American premiere of Judith Weir’s Armida with Opera at USC.

Equally at home on the concert stage, Dr. Turner has recently been featured in performances alongside international stars Andrea Bocelli and Renée Fleming. This season, he will perform as a soloist in Vaughan William’s Hodie and Handel’s Messiah in his second season with the Greenville Chorale. Dr. Turner was a 2023 Winner of the Beethoven Club Young Artist Competition.

Dr. Turner earned the Doctor of Music Arts degree in Voice Performance and Opera Stage Directing at the University of Memphis, where he received the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music Graduate Document Award for his dissertation research, titled The New Messiah: A Neo-Baroque Approach to Ornamentation in the Performance of Paul Ayres’s Messyah. He also holds degrees from the University of South Carolina and Furman University.

Dr. Turner is currently Lecturer of Music at Lander University and Teacher of Voice and Piano at the Lawson Academy of the Arts at Converse University. He continues to perform throughout the southeast while maintaining a private studio, Upstate Voice Lessons.