Jonathan Posthuma

2017 William Thomas McKinley Memorial
​Alba Music Festival Commission

We are thrilled to announce that Jonathan Posthuma, a 2016 Alba Composition Program Fellow, is the first recipient of the Alba Alumni Commission Award. This newly established comission, named in honor of the late American composer, William Thomas McKinley, is awarded annually to one of the previous years' participants in the Alba Music Festival Composition Program. Mr. Posthuma will compose a new work for this years' resident ensemble, Transient Canvas, to be premiered during the 2017 Alba Music Festival.

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About The Composer

Jonathan Posthuma (b. 1989) is a freelance composer and musician living in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and an alumnae of the 2016 Alba Music Festival Composition Program. 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 3rd 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. 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 are receiving premieres by these ensembles, including two composed for VocalEssence as part of their ReMix program, designed for emerging composers of choral music, which will be premiered at the ACDA National Festival in March 2017. Jonathan also teaches high school choir and band at Calvin Christian High School in Fridley, MN and works in the ticket office of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

Jonathan Posthuma working with Elliott McKinley during a lesson at the 2016 AMFCP