Jonathan Newman composes music rich with rhythmic drive and intricate sophistication. A recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Newman creates broadly colored musical works, often incorporating styles of pop, blues, jazz, folk, and funk into otherwise classical models. Upcoming projects include a viola concerto for soloist Brett Deubner, a quintet for Chicago’s Gaudete Brass, and a concerto for saxophone quartet and wind ensemble for the PRISM Quartet.
Recent commissions include Blow It Up, Start Again, commissioned by Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras; These Inflected Tentacles for chamber quartet; Vivid Geography for women’s chorus and chamber orchestra based on a text by poet Marcella Durand, written for the 2011 Japan Wind Ensemble Conductors Conference; and Stereo Action, commissioned by a consortium of percussion ensembles. Other recent works include Sowing Useful Truths, commissioned by the Boston University Tanglewood Institute; Symphony No. 1, My Hands Are a City—a wind ensemble consortium commission based on themes of mid-century American Beat Culture; De Profundis for massed winds; and arrangements of electronica for Acoustica: Alarm Will Sound Performs Aphex Twin (Cantaloupe), premiered at the 2005 Lincoln Center Festival. As a MacDowell Colony Fellow, he began work on an opera based on the 1962 cult horror film Carnival of Souls, in collaboration with playwright Gary Winter. His works have been recorded on Avian, BCM, Brain Music, Cantaloupe, Klavier, Mark Custom, Naxos, Potenza, and Summit Records.
Newman holds degrees from Boston University’s School for the Arts (MusB), where he studied composition with Richard Cornell and Charles Fussell and conducting with Lukas Foss, and The Juilliard School (MusM), where he studied with composers John Corigliano and David Del Tredici and conducting with Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Early training includes Boston University Tanglewood Institute and the Aspen Music Festival where he studied with composers George Tsontakis and Bernard Rands. Newman is a founding member of the composer-consortium BCM International: four stylistically-diverse composers from across the country, dedicated to enriching the repertoire with exciting works for mediums often mired in static formulas. Newman resides in Portland, Oregon.
Newman makes his Festival debut on Saturday, August 8th with Blow It Up, Start Again.
