Wachner is the author, with Kevin J. Moroney, of Psalms for All People: An Inclusive-Language Resource for Praying and Singing (Church Publishing) ISBN 9781640655614.

[11] Julian Wachner was born in 1969 in Hollywood, CA into a musical household—his mother, Mary Spire, was a pianist, and his former stepfather, Robert Cole, was a conductor.

[12][13] Wachner later attended the Boston University College of Fine Arts, where he studied with Lukas Foss, Theodore Antoniou, David Hoose and Marjorie Merryman.

[19] In 1999 he conducted the premier performance of The Magdelene Passion, by composer Elaine Bearer,[20] with the Providence Singers,[21] an hour-long oratorio with five soloists, chorus, organ and chamber orchestra.

[24] Wachner was appointed Director of Music and the Arts at Trinity Wall Street in 2011, placing him at the podium of both the church's choir and baroque orchestra.

[25] Many of Wachner's earlier published works were liturgical in purpose, written during his tenure as University Organist and Choirmaster at Marsh Chapel in the early 1990s.

[26] He first came to public attention with Canticles (1991, revised 1994), a work for chorus and orchestra written as a response to the Gulf War and as a companion piece to Fauré's Requiem.

Consisting of five movements, the work features settings of Biblical texts that bookend three poems by Shelli Jankowski-Smith about the atrocities of war .

In his program notes, theologian Wesley Wildman writes that the work concerns the "superficial opposition between worship and indictment of God ... and their breathtaking merger in the context of the Biblical story of the Babylonian exile.

The former, which Wachner composed at the Tanglewood Music Center while conducting the BUTI Young Artists Chorus, sets three erotic poems by E. E. Cummings: "there is a moon sole", "as is the sea marvelous" and "somewhere I have never travelled".

[34] Come, My Dark-Eyed One, commissioned and premiered by the Back Bay Chorale in 2009, weaves together poems by John Clare, Emily Dickinson and Sara Teasdale in a libretto compiled by soprano Marie-Ève Munger.

[29][35] Originally a companion piece for Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem, the work charts the "life and death of two lovers" in eight movements.

As I have always considered my compositional process and philosophy to be aligned with the assimilators of previous eras, (Bach, Stravinsky and Foss come to mind)—I have found equal inspiration from strict form or unbridled chaos; tonality, modality or post-tonality; and lyricism, pointillism or minimalism—I find it crucial to have as sweeping a palette of creative possibilities at my disposal as possible, believing that this desire is no different from any composer of the past.

[31]Beth Morrison, an opera producer and longtime collaborator of Wachner's, says of his compositional style: "I see his work as very Americana, firmly following in the steps of Copland and Bernstein.

[7] The next day, Trinity fired Wachner, without having concluded its investigation of the 2014 allegations, because of "recent information that Julian has otherwise conducted himself in a manner that is inconsistent with our expectations of anyone who occupies a leadership position.