Jonathan M. Blair is a composer, musicologist, theorist, pianist, and conductor. Born in San Diego in 1984 to a family of musicians and luthiers, he displayed prodigious musical aptitude early. He received lessons from an early age and began giving public recitals at 14. Scoring camcorder films for middle-school science presentations, his work drew anticipation from students and faculty, leading to constant engagement and encouragement by teachers, community, and students throughout his pre-university school career. By an early age he became relied upon for assemblies, soloist roles in concerts, and school media, a role that, upon reflection, marked him as a working composer and pianist from childhood. His exceptional grasp of music theory led to an interdistrict agreement to pursue university-level music theory to fulfill his high school requirements, solidifying his path as a theoretician and composer.

He was offered scholarship to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to pursue composition, which he accepted. At the conservatory, he received training with Anna-Marie McCarthy, where he learned to approach the piano as a composer, extracting systems, identifying thematic transformations, and informing through interpretation the formal demarcations of piece structure. Later, he studied with Marc Steiner, an early Taubman disciple, he focused on physiological awareness and body mapping toward an integrated musical approach to piano playing, and with Jan Hugo, emphasizing transhistorical approaches that subsumed touch, technique, and interpretation. These skills coalesced into a disciplined and dynamic work model which informs every aspect of his musical roles.

This pianistic approach complemented and informed Blair’s focused bachelor’s studies in composition under Conrad Susa at San Francisco Conservatory, where entrance exams placed Blair in the advanced tier of musicianship and theory classes. As head of the composition department, Susa accepted him into his personal studio (one of only two students admitted that year), noting Blair’s “fascinatingly unusual but grounded” approach to composition—a feature increasingly associated with his music by audiences and critics to this day. He continued his studies privately, focusing on post-tonal and geometrical models, and electronic implementations of acoustic space with Michael Norris. Aligning these systems through diatonic and tonal prisms, Blair began constructing his own compositional guidebooks that codified into his Metatonality treatise—an ongoing working collection of dynamic harmonic ratios, voice-leading expectations, root-bass movement guided by symmetrical and asymmetrical systems, and expanded concepts of modulation under discernible geometrical triads, quartads, and beyond.

Relocating to Cape Town in 2015, he earned a postgraduate degree in musicology. There he became aware of the many issues his musical injuries presented to musicians in professional orchestras; Conceptualizations of meter, texture, form demarcation, and personal graphical developments to notational systems. This convinced him to study conducting privately under Brandon Phillips of the Cape Town Philharmonic, and later with Stuart Martin at Stellenbosch University.

Iconic and established composer Hendrik Hofmeyr described him as “one of the most gifted young composers of his generation” and hailed his intellectual curiosity and aesthetic maturity, positioning Blair as “an important voice in the field of contemporary music.”

For example, Blair’s concerto Umo’ho’ti (Iowa Arts Council, 2018), commissioned by Matthew Coley for cimbalom, harp, percussion, and strings, melds Eastern European roots with ritualistic interplay. Experimenting with magnets, sticky tape, marbles, an egg beater, honey spoons, and hair combs, Blair crafted a synthesized soundworld through acoustic manipulation, physical surfaces, and unconventional initiators—bow, mallet, or everyday object—bridging ancient and modern aesthetics.

His opera The Summoning (Cape Town Opera, 2025), the first to explore AI’s interaction with society, unfolds a three-act post-human narrative of Nikola Tesla’s final evening, summoning guests in Room 3327 to entrust unfinished work amid a failed murder.

He scored the activist documentary Blue Burning (2024), amplifying the Amadiba people’s fight for South Africa’s Wild Coast, earning selections at Cannes Arts, London Pan African, and LA Independent Women festivals . His two-year collaboration with Mikhael Subotzky on the film Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulant [sic] resulted in a postmodern deconstruction of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung at Subotzky’s request. Blair reconstructed granular sets from Die Schöpfung to form restricted pitch and interval sets displaying dates and textual reoccurrences musically, applied through proportionally related procedures to draw both melodic and harmonic content. An obsession with Da Vinci’s water sketchbooks—particularly the difficulty Da Vinci had capturing the multifarious and reflecting layers of water, a distortion Blair found mesmerizing—became a referential impulse for Blair’s orchestration. Singers from Cape Town Opera and a chamber orchestra hand-selected from Cape Town Philharmonic musicians participated in the project. The vocality featured treatments like inverted singing, coloristic manipulation of tongue, “aired” (whispered) tones, woven into traditional operatic techniques. It won the New Renaissance Film Festival’s “Best Experimental Film.”

His opera The Summoning (Cape Town Opera, 2025), the first to explore AI’s interaction with society, unfolds a three-act post-human narrative of Nikola Tesla’s final evening, summoning guests in Room 3327 to entrust unfinished work amid a failed murder.


His song cycle Winteresse won grand prize at the first inaugural National Song Makers Guild competition, cementing Blair’s meticulous approach to vocal technique’s coloristic possibilities. His works featured as installation museum exhibitions as well.

Blair’s musicological work unifies critical, literary, and social theories with transhistorical music theory to construct a critical lens into deeper understanding of composers, the musicians and institutions they engaged, and how their personal integration of “ theory” results in interpretive demands. His theoretical work, metatonality, plays a heavy role by underscoring these shifts in voice-leading, harmonic design-ratios, scale formations, and teleological perception, managing dialoging systems that balance integration and distinctiveness—such as queer theory’s adoption into sonata theory to elucidate Debussy’s self-replicating thematic cell structure and its results on his form, or reconstructing Brahms as the forebearer of twelve-tone technique, revealing an awareness of the “cogs and wheels” of the deeper universal design of chromaticism.

His research into reconstructing ancient Jewish temple music bridges Kabbalistic gematria with quantum mechanics to align aural execution to historical data, applying critical race theory to frame religious encodings as scientific paradigms that transcend time and space.

He co-founded Stradisphere Music, where he also acts as conductor and producer of the eponymous record label subsidiary. Stradisphere offers an alternative approach to classical reach: as appreciation for the art form has waned over recent decades—coinciding with its drift from merit-based standards under ideological gatekeepers—the company carves a serious space for discussion, unmasking historicist veneers and applying an openly liberal platform for engagement and criticism.

His catalogue of works include works for solo, chamber, orchestral, theater, film, and opera. Blair is managed by Sean Laurie. His works are published by Subito Music, New York.