Jonathan Blumhofer is the winner of the 2012 anthem competition of the First Baptist Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, garnering a $2,000 prize.
His anthem, Make a Joyful Noise, with text from Psalm 98:4–9, is scored for SATB choir, brass quartet, and organ. It will be presented in worship on May 6 by the Chancel Choir with Worcester Polytechnic Institute brass, William Ness, conducting. Judges for this year’s competition were Emma Lou Diemer, John Behnke, and Z. Randall Stroope.
Jonathan Blumhofer was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1979 and began studying the violin at the age of three, later taking up the piano and the viola. He graduated from Wheaton College (Illinois) in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in music performance, and received his master’s degree in music composition in 2006 from the Boston Conservatory.
In May 2010, he was awarded his doctorate from Boston University, where his principal composition teachers were Samuel Headrick, Richard Cornell, and Joshua Fineberg. He has also studied composition with Ladislav Kubik, Jan Swafford, Dalit Warshaw, Allain Gaussin, Andre Bon, and Edwin T. Childs.
In the summers of 2005 and 2006, Dr. Blumhofer studied composition in Europe, first at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, later at the Czech American Summer Music Institute in Prague.
Jonathan Blumhofer is from Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches at Clark University.
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