BIOGRAPHICALITIES

American composer Jason Wright Wingate brings a unique and peculiar voice to contemporary classical music. Perhaps best described as a pitch serialist with a penchant for accidental tonalisms, Wingate’s deep erudition in the arts and humanities imparts to his music a meditative seriousness of purpose, while his four decades as a cellist bestow a rich and exuberant thickness to his signature sound. New works continue to grow in his ever-germinating garden of composition projects, from symphonies and string quartets to opera, oratorio, and song.

 

Born on a northern Colorado ranch in 1971, Wingate grew up under the auspices of the vibrant arts and humanities milieu of a nearby university town. A precocious regional opera debut in 1978 (in the single-line role of the naughty child in Act II of Puccini’s La Bohème) planted the seed of musical aspiration, and he soon began formal voice, piano, and cello studies with youthful zeal. Hearing Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps for the first time in 1979 led to his first compositional efforts, including a brief song cycle after Mallarmé’s Plusieurs Sonnets (for his mother’s lyric soprano), and the Symphony No. 0 (a work surreptitiously constructed from the exercises in a Persichetti harmony textbook). Also inheriting by chance an extensive Classical LP library, he thereafter spent thousands of childhood hours memorizing the Western canon and the splendid curiosities of post-war modernism. An ambitious and idealistic autodidact, Wingate resolved to properly teach himself the art of composition by creating a music curriculum from a synthesis of the offerings of the great conservatories, which he then duly studied to completion over a period of thirteen years. He also added diversity to his performative arsenal, including contrabass, viola, concert harp, various members of the viol and recorder consorts, as well as the countertenor and heldentenor Fächer.

 

His career as a cellist in Colorado and New York, both in the early music revival and the contemporary scenes, combined with his passions for art history, linguistics, and classical studies, have come to inform his unique compositional style, a chimerical union of the abstract and procedural with the referential and emotively evocative. His music tends to stretch the limits of serialism onto a neo-expressionist plane in which atonality and traditional forms become phantasmagoric bedfellows. Deeply influenced by the post-war Japanese avant-garde as well as the mystical minimalists, Wingate’s œuvre also teems with references to the visual arts, poetry, philosophy, and even to mathematics. His vocal scores have text settings in many languages, from Pāli to Old Norse. A passion for creative orchestration and a lively rivalry with the spectre of Ravel have resulted in a massive transcription of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition for grand orchestra with organ and chorus. Wingate’s extra-musical endeavors are collected in a decades-long experimental diary called Texts of the ‘Self’, which contains his literary works (such as the libretto for his opera-in-progress The Adventures of Janet, and the epic found poem The Book of Is), and documents his many sundry adventures in the sacred realms of the studia humanitatis. A curious commingling of artistic recluse and impassioned communicator, Wingate continues to compose uncommissioned works of all genres in an attempt to meaningfully contribute to the discipline of sound as high art.