Composer and clarinetist Jonathan Russell is active in a wide variety of music, from classical to experimental to klezmer to church music. His work stretches the boundaries of contemporary classical music, opening it up to the sounds and attitudes of the other musical traditions surrounding it. He has received commissions from ensembles such as the San Francisco Symphony, Empyrean Ensemble, ADORNO Ensemble, Classical Revolution, Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, and Imani Winds, and performances from numerous other ensembles and performers, including the Berkeley Symphony, San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, the BluePrint Project, the Great Noise Ensemble, the new music bands FIREWORKS, Capital M, and Oogog, and pianists Sarah Cahill, Lisa Moore, Lara Downes, and Matthew McCright.
           
Jonathan was recently commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony's Keeping Score educational outreach program to arrange portions of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring for woodwind quintet. The arrangement is being performed around the country as part of the Keeping Score program. In the summer of 2010, Imani Winds, a New York-based woodwind quintet, commissioned Jonathan to extend the arrangement by another 8 minutes, and they plan to perform it frequently during their upcoming season. Jonathan was also one of five composers chosen to arrange portions of the Rite for the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra as part of their "Incredible Shrinking Orchestra" project.

In the spring of 2009, Jonathan served as music director, composer, and arranger for The Illustrated Book of Invisible Stories, a new dance production by acclaimed choreographers Janice Garrett and Charles Moulton. After a highly successful run of sold-out shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, it returned for another sold-out run in January 2010. Jonathan will be working again with Garrett and Moulton on their next production, slated for July 2011.

In the 2007 New Ariel Competition, Jonathan’s piano piece Metamorphosis #1 was chosen to be professionally recorded for release on the Capstone record label by pianist Jeffrey Jacob. His orchestral composition Essay was the winner of the 2002 Lee Highsmith Orchestral Composition Competition, and received Honorable Mention in the 2003 Minnesota Orchestra Reading Competition.
           
An avid performer on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jonathan is a member of the heavy metal-inspired Edmund Welles bass clarinet quartet and the Balkan/klezmer/experimental band Zoyres. He also plays in, composes for, and is a founding member of the Sqwonk bass clarinet duo, which has commissioned new works from twelve composers in the past three years and released two CDs of new American bass clarinet duets. He is co-director of the Switchboard Music Festival, an annual eight-hour marathon concert that brings together the San Francisco Bay Area’s most creative and innovative composers and performers, who are stretching the boundaries and definitions of contemporary music.
           
Jonathan has served on the Music Theory Faculty at San Francisco Conservatory and on the Composition Faculty at the Conservatory’s Adult Extension Division. He has also served as Music Director at First Congregational Church, San Francisco, and written for the online San Francisco Classical Voice. He has a B.A. in Music from Harvard University and an M.M. in Music Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. His composition teachers have included Dan Becker, Elinor Armer, Eric Sawyer, John Stewart, and Eric Ewazen. He will begin PhD studies in composition at Princeton University in September 2010.