Jonathan Posthuma

Jonathan Posthuma (b. 1989) is a freelance composer and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

He recently received his Masters in Music Composition from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he studied with Stephen Dembski and Laura Schwendinger.

His orchestral work, Fili di Perle received 3^rd Prize in the Karol Szymanowski International Composers Competition in Katowice, Poland and was premiered in March 2016. As part of his degree requirement, Jonathan composed and recorded, The God of Material Things, a song cycle for narrator, soloist, chorus, and orchestra, which sets the poetry of David Schelhaas, professor emeritus of Dordt College, where Jonathan studied composition privately with Luke Dahn while completing his Bachelors in Music Education. Other recent large ensemble works include An Isthmus Aubade, dedicated to Scott Teeple and the UW-Madison Wind Ensemble and premiered in April 2015 and Concerto Grosso No. 1 for strings, percussion, and piano, commissioned and premiered by the Madison Area Youth Orchestra and Clocks in Motion in June 2015.

In August 2017, he participated in the International Workshop of Orchestral Composition at the Federal University of Paraná, where the scherzo from his Chamber Symphony “Beams of Heaven” was premiered by the student orchestra. Among his other awards are 2011 BMI Student Composer Award for Five Studies for Piano: Two Pencils and a Hymnbook and an award for sound design from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for his incidental music for The Glass Menagerie.

Jonathan sings in two auditioned choirs in the Twin Cities: VocalEssence Chorus and Kantorei, and a few of his choral works have received premieres by these ensembles, including two composed for VocalEssence as part of their ReMix program, designed for emerging composers of choral music, which were premiered at the ACDA National Festival in March 2017 and at Minnesota’s ACDA Festival in November 2017.

Recently, he was selected as a participant for the inaugural Mostly Modern Festival, where selections from Paul Klee: Painted Songs, an ongoing collection of chamber works inspired by the visual art of Paul Klee were premiered in addition to a performance of two movements from his Chamber Symphony with the American Modern Orchestra.