Jason Thorpe Buchanan (b. 1986) is an American composer of contemporary concert music.  His work draws from a broad variety of aesthetic genres and influences, and has been described by leading composers in the United States and Europe as "symphonic..." and "ambitious."   Since 2007, he has served as director of the composer's consortium Melos Music, as well as their annual New Music Concert series.   Jason spent 2010-2011 living in Germany, where he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater as a visiting scholar for studies with Peter Michael Hamel, Manfred Stahnke, Georg Hajdu and Sascha Lino Lemke while conducting research and interviews in regard to compositional process and aesthetics.   In 2011 his Berlin Songs, for two singers and mixed chamber ensemble, were performed for an audience of 400 grantees and staff at the Pan-European Fulbright conference in Berlin, Germany under the baton of Thomas Heuser, who commissioned the work. An expanded orchestration was later recorded and premiered in the United States at the 2nd Annual Melos New Music Concert in San Francisco, and later at the Eastman School of Music, both conducted by the composer.   In 2010 his orchestral work - The Gods of Pegãna, was read by the Brevard Music Center Orchestra under the baton of Ken Lam, and was later a finalist in both the ASCAP Morton Gould and ACF Minnesota Composer's Institute competitions (2011).   In 2009, A Zarzuela & Other Lost Works was premiered by the Tad Wind Symphony in Tokyo for an audience of over 800, and recorded with a CD released on the Windstream label in Japan.

  Jason began his studies at age fourteen at the College of San Mateo, CA, later attending San José State University to receive Bachelor's degrees in composition and in music technology, where he was awarded the Outstanding Senior award (2008). He received his Master's degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught courses in composition and music theory (2008-10), later presented the Outstanding Graduate Student award (2009-10) by both the Music Department and the College of Fine Arts.   He has studied composition with Virko Baley, Peter Michael Hamel, Jorge Grossmann, Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Pablo Furman, Kevin Puts, Robert Aldridge, and Manfred Stahnke, as well as conducting with maestro Takayoshi Suzuki.

As a conductor, Jason has premiered and recorded new works by living composers including Daniel Temkin, Tonia Ko, Chin Ting Chan, Tom Brennan, and Christopher Chandler, as well as his own with ensembles such as Ossia, ITCH, the UNLV Brass Ensemble, and Nonsemble6.   Jason has received awards from ASCAP, ACF, MPE, the NEON and Brevard Music Festivals, UNLV, SJSU, the Eastman School of Music, and the Miami Beach International Animated Film Festival as composer and music supervisor for the winner of Best Feature (2009).   His upcoming projects include a cycle of virtuosic works for solo instruments with a commission by Michael Rene Torres for Alto Saxophone and a collaboration with MacArthur "Genius" Award winning artist Anna Schuleit for Piano and Live Electronics to be premiered by Daniel Pesca, a sound collage/score for a documentary on Busking/street artists in Hamburg, and a chamber concerto for Horn soloist commissioned by Michael Walker.   Jason currently studies composition with Allan Schindler and holds a Teaching Assistantship at the Computer Music Center as a Ph.D. student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY.

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(updated 05.18.11)