Brandon Burns | Organist

Brandon Burns is the Interim Organist and Director of Youth and Children’s Bells at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale. He is currently pursuing the Doctor of Musical Arts in Organ Performance at Arizona State University where he studies with Kimberly Marshall. He earned the Master of Sacred Music degree at the University of Notre Dame where he studied with Craig Cramer. There he earned the Academic Excellence Award and the Craig Cramer Award for excellence in organ performance. While at the University of Notre Dame, he worked as an organist at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree in Sacred Music from Lenoir-Rhyne University where he studied organ with Florence Jowers and choral conducting and liturgy with Paul Weber. While at Lenoir-Rhyne, Brandon was the Director of Music at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Newton, NC, where he served as organist and directed the adult and children’s choirs and the handbell ensemble.

Brandon has attended organ academies in Alkmaar, the Netherlands, and Lövstabruk, Sweden, as well as having played historic organs in Germany, Poland, Italy, and England. In addition to studying organ performance and sacred music, he has trained in organ building and repair with both the Fritz Noack Organ Company in Georgetown, MA and Taylor and Boody Organbuilders in Staunton, VA. In June 2017, he was a recitalist in the Piccolo Spoleto Festival L’Organo Series in Charleston, SC, and in March 2018, he accompanied the Phoenix Symphony Chorus in a performance of Duruflé’s Requiem on the Richards, Fowkes, and Company organ at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church. Brandon is currently involved in researching the development of the German Romantic organ in southern and central Germany in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century.