Jason Noble is a professor of instrumental and electroacoustic composition at Université de Moncton. He has been described as “a master at translating feeling and imparting emotion through music,” and his compositions have been called “a remarkable achievement, indeed brilliant, colourful, astounding, challenging.” His work seeks balance between innovation and accessibility, motivated by a belief that contemporary music can be genuinely progressive and genuinely accessible at the same time.
Jason’s compositions have been performed across Canada, and in USA, Mexico, Argentina,
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Italy, and New Zealand, with forthcoming performances in Ireland, Switzerland, and Russia. His music has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts, appearing on several critically acclaimed commercial recordings and scores. Jason’s piece Folk Suite, for which was nominated for the East Coast Music Award for Classical Composer of the Year (2024), appears on Adam Cicchillitti and Lara Deutsch’s album Wanderlust, and his piece River and Cave appears on the Cowan-Cicchillitti Duo’s album Focus, which won the ECMA for Classical Recording of the Year (2021). His music has been performed by ensembles including the Sudbury Symphony
Orchestra, the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra, the Phoenix Chamber Choir, Pro Coro Canada, East Coast Brass, Lady Cove, Newman Sound, Shallaway, and many university ensembles, as well as leading soloists including Stick & Bow (Juan Sebastian Delgado and Krystina Marcoux), Hannah Darroch, Peter Sullivan, Kristan Toczko, Chee-Hang See, James Hurley, and Steve Cowan. He has held numerous composition residencies including Choral Art: Conductors and Composers at the Banff Centre, the St. John’s International Sound Symposium, the Bathurst Chamber Music Festival, the Edge Island Festival for Choirs and Composers, and the Newfoundland and Labrador Registered Music Teachers’ Association’s Canada Music Week. He cofounded the Montreal Contemporary Music Lab and is an active member of the international ACTOR Project (Analysis, Creation, and Teaching of Orchestration).
A proud native Newfoundlander, Jason frequently incorporates elements of his Newfoundland
heritage into his compositions. This often involves melodic or stylistic borrowings from folk music, such as in his forthcoming Atlantic Suite for the MUN Wind Ensemble, but can also involve more indirect connections such as contemporary soundworlds inspired by images and impressions of Newfoundland. Jason’s long-term collaborative project The Music of Dialect, with guitarist Steve Cowan, uses the rhythms, colours, and melodies of Newfoundland dialects as the basis for contemporary musical composition. This project is culminating in an album, One Foot in the Past for guitar, recorded speech, and electronics, which will be released on Centrediscs later this year.
Also an accomplished scholar, Jason’s PhD at McGill University was funded by the prestigious
Vanier Scholarship (SSHRC). He subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at McGill and Université de Montréal. His research appears in leading journals including Music Perception, Music Theory Online, Organised Sound, Soundboard Scholar, and Journal of New Music Research, as well as edited volumes including Performing Time: Synchrony and Temporal Flow in Music and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2023), Music and Time: Psychology, Philosophy, Practice (Boydell & Brewer, 2022), and The Routledge Companion to Interdisciplinary Studies in Singing (Routledge, 2020). Jason is an editor and contributing uthor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Orchestration Studies. He has presented at numerous
national and international conferences and invited guest lectures.
Jason has been a dedicated teacher, examiner, and adjudicator for many years, working for the Kiwanis Festival, Conservatory Canada, and many other university and pre-university institutions. An alumnus of the MUN School of Music, he is thrilled to return to St. John’s to work with the Young Composers in the Tuckamore Festival.
