Biography

Justin WEISS

© DR

Justin Weiss is a Chicago-based composer whose music engages with the intersections of lyricism, liminality, fragility, and textural play through captivating formal trajectories. Justin’s music has been performed internationally by many ensembles and musicians.

Upcoming projects include collaborations with the Grossman Ensemble and the TAK Ensemble. Justin has received awards and recognitions from YoungArts, ASCAP, Encore Wind Ensemble, and Tribeca New Music.


Justin is currently the conductor for the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble. As a conductor, Justin has performed with the VICE Ensemble, Oberlin Sinfonietta and Contemporary Music Ensemble, the soundSCAPE Sinfonietta, and has premiered over 50 new works internationally. Justin studied conducting with Tim Weiss (Oberlin) and Sian Edwards (Royal Academy). Justin has taught composition and music theory at the University of Chicago, Brightpoint Community College (Virginia), was a founding teacher of the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra’s Young Composer Program, and was a mentor for the Royal Opera House’s Young Composer Mentor Project (London, UK).

Justin completed his undergraduate studies at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he received the 2017 Aschaffenburg Prize in Composition, and he received a Master’s in composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London as the recipient of the Dr. Mosco Carner Scholarship. Justin is currently a PhD Fellow in Composition at the University of Chicago where he studies with Augusta Read Thomas. He has previously studied with Jesse Jones, Aaron Helgeson, Lewis Nielson, and Philip Cashian.

Justin has also studied at the l’Ecole d’Art de Fontainebleau. 

 

Work(s)

" Multitudes "

For Orchestra

I have lately been fascinated by the work of the relatively unknown abstract expressionist artist, Norman Lewis. Compared with his contemporaries like Rothko or Pollock, Lewis is not featured in contemporary art exhibits across the world, yet his art speaks with volumes of intensity and power. I first came across Lewis' piece, Multitudes, which was tucked away in a corner of the “Art of the Americas” wing in the Art Institute of Chicago, but I was immediately allured by the layering of jagged lines and angular shapes over beautiful hues of melting color fields. 

In this work and many others by Lewis, a quasi-optical illusion forms; when attempting to focus on either the hues or the lines, the other is, in fact, drawn out even more. It’s as if the lines are in relief of the shadings and the shadings are in relief of the lines.

The title of Lewis’ painting comes from Walt Whitman’s Songs of Myself : “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes).”

In this piece, I drew on both the ideas of contrasting and layering lines and shadows as well as the balance of foreground and background as are both present in my experience of the painting. There are moments of multiple melodic shapes forming both a shadow and a composite melody; articulations against the melodic shape; linear melodies being drawn out into a harmonic field yet activated on the surface; or a focus on the angular melodies while a macro-harmonic motion evolves more slowly in the background. By having sections which draw attention towards certain elements foreground/background and jagged/hues dichotomies of the painting, I attempt to create my own “multitude” of experiences that all stem from one central, connected idea.

Justin Weiss