A Perfectly Useful Personal Biography
I was born and raised in East Texas, in the small town of Silsbee. My musical life has been mostly shaped by family background. My father’s people came from Mississippi and settled around Bessmay (a lumber town in Jasper County, now a ghost town). They were country Baptists and many of them were fine singers in that tradition: when my grandmother, Eddie Darlene Biscamp, was a child, her mother took her around to the neighboring backwoods churches to sing “specials” for them. Though I lost my grandmother in 2003, her high, tense country voice still rings in my ears. Obviously, the Biscamps come from German stock.

My mother’s people are ornery Scots-Irish folk from a part of the East Texas Big Thicket called Caney Head. These are mostly sojourners from Appalachia who came through and quite literally got stuck in the Thicket.* My mother’s people were far from Baptists: they were Holy Ghost sanctified Pentecostals. I grew up with country Pentecostal music, which is an odd amalgam of honky-tonk and gospel. My father was the “song leader” at our church on the outskirts of Silsbee. I remember him pounding the pulpit to the beat, eyes closed, singing out in a high tenor. He also played guitar at church. We sometimes had singings at our house on Sunday nights: my other played piano by ear and sang alto.

The greatest influence on my piano writing was one of our preachers, Brother James West, who played the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. When he “got the Holy Ghost” his playing became increasingly imprecise, which produced some very interesting harmonies.

My output surely reveals the tortured relationship I have with my religious upbringing. There were elements of the fervent religion that quashed freethinking. I’ve made my own kind of peace. Spirituality is personal, so all I’ll say is that I still draw on the inspiration of my childhood, and without irony.

*My maternal grandfather’s people are chronicled in “The Stories of I.C. Eason: King of the Dog People” by National Geographic photographer/writer Blair Pittman – available from UNT Press.

High Falootin’ Professional Third-Person Biography
B. P. Herrington was born in Silsbee, Texas, in 1976. His music has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Academy Symphony Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, the BBC Singers, the Montague String Quartet and pianist Wu Qian, in venues such as Queen Elizabeth Hall, Carnegie Hall, and London’s Purcell Room. He is founding director of Intersection New Music Collective based at Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, Texas, and active in the Houston area.

Composition awards include the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, Morton Gould Award (ASCAP), Leo Kaplan Prize (ASCAP), First Music Award (New York Youth Symphony) and two composition awards from the Royal Academy of Music. His music has been performed at the Soundscape Festival in Italy, UMKC Cello Days, OMMAGIO (the memorial concert for Berio in London), the Royal Festival Hall Organ Recital Series, the Society for the Promotion of New Music (U.K.), and the Darmstadt International Summer Institute.

He earned a Ph.D. in music composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he studied from 2001-2004. He has studied privately with Marc Satterwhite and Steve Rouse at the University of Louisville, and Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Simon Bainbridge at the Royal Academy. He has attended composition masterclasses with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Karel Husa and Donald Erb. Herrington also attended masterclasses with Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer and Georges Aperghis at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses in 2006. In addition to studying trumpet and piano at the undergraduate and graduate levels, he studied conducting privately, in graduate seminars and in masterclasses (Craig Kirkhoff).

I've provided a personal bio (useful) and a professional bio (the obligatory thinly disguised resume).