Jason Thorpe Buchanan’s works have been described as “an unearthly collage of sounds”, “sharply-edged”, & “free jazz gone wrong”, commissioned and performed by ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Interface, Ensemble Nikel, Ensemble Linea, IKTUS Percussion, The Industry, wild Up, the [Switch~ Ensemble], OSSIA, & the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble, among others. Nominated for the 2015 Gaudeamus Prize, three of his works will be presented at Muziekweek in September. Scenes from Hunger have received performances at the Darmstadt Contemporary Opera Workshop (2014), The Industry’s FIRST TAKE Opera Workshop in L.A. (2015), & the MATA Interval 8 Series in NYC with the [Switch~ Ensemble]. “Jason Thorpe Buchanan's Hunger is a kind of training session in mental disintegration… An ungodly opera needs ugly music, singers who produce primal sounds, an electric guitar that sounds scraped raw, a [sic] wailing orchestral effects, cuts the ear like a knife. Buchanan delivers.” - Los Angeles Times

Honors awards include a Fulbright Fellowship (2010-11) at the HfMT Hamburg (Germany), Artist-in-Residence USF Verftet/City Council of Bergen, Norway (2015), ASCAP Morton Gould Award, Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize, Winner of newEar Composer’s Competition, 2nd place American Prize, commissions from Mizzou International Composers Festival, International Horn Society, Tzlil Meudcan Festival (Tel Aviv), German/American Fulbright-Kommission, the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, and others. He is coordinator of the VIPA Festival’s Composition & Contemporary Music Program (Spain), as well as conductor/artistic director of the Computer Music Center’s ensemble-in-residence, the [Switch~Ensemble], as a Ph.D. candidate at the Eastman School of Music, where he has served as course instructor in electronic music and composition, as well as assistant conductor for the Musica Nova Ensemble with Brad Lubman. Current projects include Hunger, a multimedia opera with libretto by award-winning poet Darcie Dennigan, a work for Andrew Allen (saxophone), electronics, & video (World Saxophone Congress, Strasbourg, 2015), a commission for the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra as winner of Iron Composer 2014 (Cleveland, May 2015), and a commission for Slagwerk Den Haag to be premiered at Gaudeamus Muziekweek (Netherlands, Sept. 2015). www.jasonthorpebuchanan.com