Jonathan Weiss is a composer, pianist, and teacher based in New Haven, CT. When he was seven, his mom gave him a Casio piano keyboard for Christmas, and Jonathan couldn’t stop teaching himself tunes by ear and creating ideas of his own. Since then, his passion for musical discovery has carried him through many adventures.
In 2020, Jonathan won an ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composer Award. His compositions have been performed at venues including The Green Room 42, the Atlantic Music Festival, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and a masterclass with the violinist Hilary Hahn.
Jonathan graduated from Yale College in 2024 with a B.A. in Music. He studied piano and composition under Kathryn Alexander, Nathan Roberts, Konrad Kaczmarek, Howard Frazin, Rodney Lister, and Jeanine Tesori. As a composer, Jonathan emphasizes collaboration and communication with performers as early as possible in his process. Musicians he has worked closely with include Jennifer Beattie, Krista River, Jacqueline Kaskel, Sophie Dvorak, Phoebe Liu, Anna Zhong, Epongue Ekille, Jacob Miller, Charnice Hoegnifioh, David Leach and Julia Connor, and Sharon Ahn.
While Jonathan’s work ranges in style, it is unified by a voice that is at once confident and vulnerable. Recently, Jonathan composed the soundtrack for Jeffrey Steele’s production of Black N Blue Boys / Broken Men, a play about young men who collectively process their severe traumas. Passionate about connecting to young people with disabilities, he serves as a volunteer composer for Hear Your Song and taught piano to his older brother, Luke, who has multiple profound physical and developmental disabilities.
At Yale, Jonathan became fascinated with medieval literature and music when he discovered the folktale of Melusina.
Melusina, a powerful fairy-human hybrid, grew up with a terrible secret. At age fifteen, her mother cursed her to transform into a serpent from the waist down, every Saturday. No one knew this, not even her husband, Raymond, whom Melusina agreed to marry, as long as he left her alone on Saturdays.
Jonathan is composing a musical called Melusina’s Curse, based largely on the most popular medieval telling, a 1393 romance novel by Jean d’Arras, while also incorporating ample original research. In the summer of 2023, Jonathan analyzed artistic depictions of Melusina and interviewed scholars in Germany, Luxembourg, France, and the UK through several Yale fellowships. For his thesis, he completed Act One and presented workshops and performances with the Yale Symphony Orchestra and several other student musicians.
In 2023, Jonathan was chosen as an inaugural recipient of the Chauncey Fellowship, a program of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven for college graduates with artistic and service-oriented goals. Through the Fellowship, Jonathan is writing and orchestrating Act Two of Melusina’s Curse, offering music lessons in the community, and serving as a pianist and a chorister for Bethesda Lutheran Church and as the music director of Yale Taizé.
But most importantly, seeing as you have read this far—who are you? Jonathan wants to get to know you. Get in touch! Share with friends on socials! Et cetera.
