Jonathan Weiss is a professional composer and music teacher based in New Haven, CT.
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Jonathan aspires to be a composer in the old-school sense, as a creative artist who serves the expressive needs of his community.” – Howard Frazin, Artistic director of WordSong, Inc. and former Composition faculty for the New England Conservatory and the Longy School of Music
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Jonathan was unfailingly encouraging and engaged in active, supportive collaboration with his vocalist.” – Tina Lu, Head of Pauli Murray College
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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.” – Yale College Beekman Friends of Music Prize
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=383DUKoWhKY On February 14, 2025, the Yale Concert Band, in partnership with the Sing Me a Story Foundation, performed the world premiere of my composition, “The Cancer-Free Party,” to celebrate…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.