Jonathan M. Blair is a composer, theorist and musicologist. Originally from California he relocated to Cape Town, South Africa in 2015. His works feature compositions for solo instruments, chamber collectives, orchestra and vocal ensembles. Blair’s music features a high interest in the ‘impossible transformations’ afforded by electronic synthesis blending, microtonal substructures within 12-EDO(Equaled-Divisional-Octaves), geometrically derived harmonic classes — of which tonal and diatonic procedures represent a partitioned subset —, as well as the marriage of psychoacoustics and orchestration. As an orchestrator, Blair’s works assumes deep compositional symbiosis between spatial parameters, extended harmonic teleology and timbral registers. In addition to a fascination with instrumentation constructs, Blair continually engages with vocalists to extend what is possible with the voice, through both physical and digital manipulations.
As a musicologist, Blair’s work builds a tension between the observance of a deep historical practice sifted through the awareness of a shifting diachronic process, and, subconscious modernist revisions of those practices posed against the urge for composers to forge new pathways of hearing and codifying sound into music. Much of his work as a musicologist is contextualized as criticisms of the socio-political representations that have arrested the critical interests of ‘new musicology’; the systems of power dynamics, queer theory, gender-politics, deconstructionist models, and post-colonial narratives of Western dominance. However, not impervious to its placement within the great discourse within Western aesthetic, his works by no means embraces an attempt to erode or diminish the developments made to musicology over the last two decades — as can be observed in his affiliation with Western art in both his academic writings and the referential material in his music—, but rather an attempt to unravel particular prejudices and preferences that have blinded musicolgoists to the multifarious cultural, psychological and ritualistic ways of experiencing art and the philosophy that anchors its existence.
Blair received training as a composer under the late Conrad Susa where he pursued his bachelors of music, with a focus on composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Afterwards, he studied privately with the award winning New Zealand composer, Michael Norris. He studied piano with Anna-Marie McCarthy at the conservatory, later transitioning to the focus of the physiological apparatus of piano playing with Marc Steiner, and then to the transhistorical approaches of generational technical facility as related to their idiosyncratic composers under Jan Hugo. Concurrently while in South Africa, Blair has focused on post-graduate studies in musicology at the University of South Africa, where he received distinctions. He studied conducting with Brandon Philips, resident conductor of the Cape Town Philharmonic.
As a theorist, his chief concerns aim at recasting the erroneous assumptions of so-called atonal and post-tonal music to imply aberrations of normative functions, to something historically diachronic. By elucidating the principles of voice-leading and symmetrical mappings of internal chordal structures, Blair attempts to reveal the geographical relationships underpinning tonal music can — and have — expanded our understanding of what diatonicism is; what tonality is; and what it can be in the future. As to not obfuscate the contemporary notions confused with the specious binary positions of ‘tonality’ and ‘atonality/post-tonality’ Blair subsumes the correlations under the term 'meta-tonality’, within which a universal set of infinite pitch classes can formulate sub-species with localized laws that govern a particular set of ‘tonal’ directions within that subset. These subsets can further modulate to other subsets through inversional similarity, so that ‘common-practice-era’ formations can lead naturally to ‘post-tonal’ and vice-versa. Within this scope, various aspects propagate his arguments:
Chromatic triad mappings
Serial-partitioning and fixed-focused expansions
Common-tone pitch class set modulation
Linear stratification(extensions of Webern’s legacy)
Neo-diatonicism, Neo-modalism and vertical diatonic stratification
Extensions on Boulez’s frequency multiplication
line-transformational and interval-transformational expansions
Rotational mechanics
Neo-Riemannian affinities(Cohn, Tymoczko)
Blair’s music has been performed in the U.S., Africa, and Europe, and he actively receives commissions from artists all over the world. His music has been featured on radio, podcasts, and currently set to be released in film, and museum exhibit.
He has won several awards and competitions including the first annual grand prize of the national Song Makers Guild which solidified his importance as a composer meticulously dedicated to vocal writing, and ‘best experimental film’ in the New Renaissance Film Festival in Amsterdam for ‘Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent’ of which he composed the narrative oratorio that carries the dramaturgy of the film, and in which the film was awarded in the New Renaissance Film Festival in Amsterdam.
His orchestral works are published by Subito Publishers, New York, the ensemble and solo works are published by Novus Neuma Music, and he is represented by manager Daniel Baldwin.
