Jonathan Heilbron always remembers his parents fostering a love of music, but it was a chance advertisement offering subsidised double bass lessons that led Jonathan to pursue a career in music. The tuition offered by Melbourne Youth Orchestras led Jonathan to study at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School, followed by undergraduate training at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).
During his final year at VCA in 2011, Jonathan attended the Kunst-Universität Graz (Austria) where he studied with Timothy Dunin and attended masterclasses with Uli Fussenegger. Shortly after, he successfully auditioned for ANAM to study under Damien Eckersley in 2012.
Jonathan remembers feeling like he “jumped onto a moving train”, with the sheer number of performances he was involved in at ANAM. Looking back, he says it was great preparation for a career as a freelance musician.
“Some weeks at ANAM there were multiple projects running simultaneously, each requiring a different mindset or approach, and being able to manage time well and work efficiently has proved to be an important career skill.”
He also notes the artistic freedom he had in curating his ANAM recital, which featured music spanning across four centuries; from madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo to works by György Kurtág and Morton Feldman. “I knew I wanted to push myself to explore some of the music I loved but had never performed. I remember feeling like I had the resources and support to present my program exactly as I conceived it, which was liberating and also got me thinking more seriously about what it means to put one piece next to another in a program. This freedom to experiment with programming and staging concerts continues to be important to me."
After a year at ANAM, Jonathan moved to Europe and commenced a Master of Contemporary Music in Graz, Austria, which included a semester on exchange in Oslo, Norway. When he graduated in 2018, he was already an established name on the new music circuit, performing with ensembles such as Ensemble KNM Berlin (with whom he is now a permanent member since 2020), Klangforum Wien, Ensemble Modern Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Apartment House (UK), Soundinitiative Paris, Musikfabrik Cologne, Ensemble Resonanz in Hamburg, and Remix at the Casa da Música in Porto.
In addition to his freelance work, Jonathan is currently a member of the Harmonic Space Orchestra, a Berlin-based collective of composer-performers dedicated to the study and performance of microtonality and music in Just intonation. He is also the founder of the Phonetic Orchestra, which has been a constant presence and provided some of the most memorable performances of Jonathan’s life since its inception in 2012. The Phonetic Orchestra are a collective of musicians (which includes another ANAM alum, Callum G’Froerer) that create new works embracing site-specificity, extreme durations (some concerts are 8 hours or even 24 hours in length), and blur the lines between composition and improvisation, allowing works to take shape while celebrating the stylistic diversity of the musicians of the collective. This shared approach has become increasingly important to Jonathan’s performance practice, and he cherishes the ability to create new works with long-time colleagues that continually inspire him.
Jonathan recently completed a PhD in Music Performance at Monash University in Melbourne, diving deep into the world of Fernando Grillo, an overlooked 20th Century composer-performer. It gives Jonathan great pride to know that his work is contributing towards bringing new audiences into Grillo’s magical musical universe.
Jonathan is humble about his achievements, and says he feels fortunate to work both in the realms of contemporary and classical music. “I am lucky to have the best of both worlds in the sense that I work regularly with some incredible musicians and people for whom I have immense respect in my ensembles, while also forging new connections through my work as a guest musician both in Berlin and abroad.” He encourages anyone with a musical interest to pursue it however it is most meaningful to them.
“Expressing the things you love and think about through sound is a very powerful mode of communication, and there are as many ways to write and/or perform music as there are people in the world.”
Recordings of Jonathan’s compositions and collaborative projects have been released on labels including Another Timbre (UK), INSUB. (Switzerland), Intonema (Russia) and Inexhaustible Editions (Slovenia).
Visit jonheilbronmusic.com for more information about Jonathan’s latest projects.
Words by Laura Panther (Jun 2024)
Image credit: Camille Blake