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Jason Thorpe Buchanan is a tri-continentally active composer, intermedia artist, and music technologist. His works explore multiplicity, causality, behavior, and the integration of live performance with technology.
He has been recognized internationally as recipient of a 2010-11 Fulbright Fellowship (Hamburg), a 2015 American-Scandinavian Foundation Grant, fellowships and commissions from EMPAC (2025), Royaumont (France, 2016 & 2017), the Mizzou International Composers Festival (2013), the International Horn Society (2014), Eklekto Percussion (Switzerland, 2015), Tetractys New Music (Austin), Tzlil Meudcan, the Earle Brown Music Foundation, two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards (2014 & 2015), winner of Iron Composer (2014), the Howard Hanson Orchestral Prize (2014) and more, including selection as Artist-in-Residence at USF Verftet (Norway), the Embassy of Foreign Artists (Switzerland), the Brush Creek Foundation (Wyoming), nomination for the 2015 Gaudeamus Prize, and as a 2024 Aaron Copland Bogliasco Fellow (Italy).
Commissions and performances have included collaborations with Alarm Will Sound, the Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Interface (DE), Ensemble Nikel (Israel), Linea (FR), Insomnio (NL), EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble (UK), Slagwerk Den Haag (NL), Eklekto Percussion (CH), the Mivos Quartet (USA), Iktus Percussion, the Blue Water Chamber Orchestra, Académie Voix Nouvelles Ensemble (FR), New European Ensemble, wild Up, the NY Virtuoso Singers, the Eastman Musica Nova Ensemble, TACETi (Thailand), the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Line Upon Line, and more. Scenes from his multimedia opera Hunger have received performances at Darmstadt, The Industry’s FIRST TAKE in L.A., and MATA (NYC) with the [Switch~ Ensemble].
Jason serves as Artistic Associate and Lecturer in New Media and Digital Technologies for Music at the Hochschule für Musik ‘Carl Maria von Weber’ Dresden, Germany within the Hybrid Music Lab, as well as Artistic Director of the [Switch~ Ensemble] and Faculty Artist of the International Composition Institute of Thailand, IntAct Festival (2019-present). He has formerly served as 2022 Interim Managing Director of the New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, 2020 Visiting Lecturer in Composition and Interim Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, 2018-2022 Department Chair/Lecturer in Composition, Theory, and Electroacoustic Music at the College of Music, Mahidol University (Thailand), 2015-2017 Executive Director of the VIPA Festival (Spain), Curator for the San Francisco Center for New Music, and as founding director of the TICF International Academy for Young Composers.
His mentors have included Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon, Steven Takasugi, Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, and Georges Aperghis.
He holds a Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music and is widely sought as a guest composer, conductor, and lecturer at institutions such as the University of Chicago, Stanford University, TRANSIT Festival (Belgium), TIME SPANS Festival (NYC), MATA, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory (Singapore), the SinusTon Festival (Germany), the Bergen Center for Elektronisk Kunst (Norway), and dozens of Universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Current projects include a large work on the subject of human memory titled The End of Forgetting for NADAR, Hypercube, and the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Ecology of Disruption for Line Upon Line, GRIDS for the [Switch~ Ensemble], a new work for [Switch~]’s violinist Lauren Cauley, and the development of new systems for gestural tracking and interactivity within the Hybrid Music Lab, HfM Dresden.
