Composer, cellist, poet, autodidact, polymath, and mystic, Jason Wright Wingate was born December 12, 1971 on a Colorado ranch, the son of an opera singer and a livestock auctioneer. Early training in voice and piano led to a precocious opera debut at age seven (as the naughty child in Act II of Puccini's La Bohème) and to the creation of his first composition, a song cycle setting of the season poems from Blake's Poetical Sketches. Subsequent studies in cello performance produced early appointments in regional orchestras, inaugurating an ardent intimacy with the symphonic and operatic literatures, and indelibly shaping a taste for the epic in sonic and dramatic structure.
As a cellist, his distinctive commingling of impassioned virtuosity and historical musicology brought about a performance of the original, pre-Fitzenhagen version of Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations at that composer's centenary festivities, as well as the creation of a period-accurate Baroque chamber orchestra, through which he restored and performed many obscure works of the neglected cello concert repertoire. His friendships with other composers and predilection for the experimental have spawned the creation and premiere performances of many new cello works. An ambitious transcription of Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition for orchestra, organ and chorus is the fruit of his exploration into the craft of orchestration by means of an iconic musical text.
As a poet, his large found prose-poem The Book of is was created by 'disembedding' the biblical Book of Genesis into a new surrealist mythopoeia, and this text also serves as a quasi-libretto for his Symphony No. 1, a monumental ballet score for unaccompanied cello. His wide readings of diverse authors, ancient and modern, have sired an immense experimental diary known as Texts of the ‘Self’, which includes such works as Psychogeographies, and the set of postmodernist translational variations (on the Hesse and Eichendorff texts used by Strauss in the Vier letzte Lieder) known as the Eleven Last Songs.
Moving to New York in 1997, Wingate began a decade-long search for a personal solution to what he has called 'the many problems of post-tonality', culminating in the creation of the first two symphonies. The second of these, known as Kleetüden (punning on the German word for 'études') is an orchestral response to the artist Paul Klee consisting of 27 tone paintings, united as variations on a theme generated from the artist's name. Other orchestral projects include a new oratorio setting of the Lucan infancy narrative, and a symphonic homage to the French experimental writer Hélène Cixous, whom he much admires. Several more symphonies and two operas currently await completion. Wingate continues to live and work in New York City.
