Music Director

The Philadelphia Dance Academy

After Curtis, Paul connected with the renowned dance scholar and pedagogue Nadia Chilkovsky and became music director at her Philadelphia Dance Academy — a source of many well-known dancers from the 1950s through the mid-1970s. He held the post from 1975 to 1979.

The Ballet of the Twentieth Century

In 1979 he went east to Brussels as a composer and arranger with Maurice Béjart’s Ballet of the Twentieth Century, where he stayed until 1982.

The Ballet of Lyon

From Brussels he headed south to become Music Director of the Ballet of Lyon in France, a position he held from 1982 to 1986, alongside work as composer and music director at Théâtre Les Ateliers in Lyon from 1982 to 1989.

Through much of the 1980s his time was divided between these posts, with many forays into Italy and Germany for work with smaller theatre and dance groups, and a good number of organ and piano concerts besides. Because of those years he could converse in five languages.

Lyon, beyond the ballet

He was organ soloist in Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass with Serge Baudo and the Lyon National Orchestra and Chorus in 1984, having served as Baudo’s assistant at the Berlioz Festival in Lyon two years earlier.