Jonathan Weiss is a professional composer and music teacher based in New Haven, CT. Welcome to his website!
Praise:
- Jonathan was unfailingly encouraging and engaged in active, supportive collaboration with his vocalist.” – Tina Lu, Head of Pauli Murray College
- The piece… is characterized by clear and focused lyrics, a distinctive harmonic language, and a natural and balanced sense of musical phrase and overall form.” – Beekman Friends of Music Prize
Yale Concert Band Performs “The Cancer-Free Party”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=383DUKoWhKY On February 14, 2025, the Yale Concert Band performed the world premiere of my composition, “The Cancer-Free Party,” commissioned in partnership with Sing Me a Story to celebrate siblings…
I Dug up A Personal Narrative From Seventh Grade
I visited Boston last weekend and stopped by my old home to see my parents and my brother. Before I left, my dad made sure I rifled through a box of some old middle school papers and materials.
Transcribing and Composing a Modern Arrangement of “Byrd one brere”
The oldest extant English love song remains as faded ink on warped manuscript paper kept in the King’s College Archives. A 14th-century scribe jotted down all the lyrics but did not bother to complete the music, leaving an entire staff blank.
Dreamed-up Music: The role of dreams in musical creativity from 1740 to the present
Dreaming and musical creativity alike may rely on a shared network of several brain regions, corroborating composers’ anecdotal claims that dreams play a significant role in their creativity.
Sick of Love: Poor Prospects for Love-Sick Men in Three Subversive Medieval Lyrics
Three medieval love lyrics close to each other in a manuscript known as Harley 2253 seem utterly unrelated to each other, apart from their pessimism and their sheer idiosyncrasy.
Innovating Jazz by Rejecting the “Jazz” Label
What Coleman and Pascoal share is a central pursuit of exploration, experimentation, and innovation that is held in conversation with their unequivocal rejection of the “jazz” label.