John Kosch


website: johnkosch.com
e-mail: johnkosch@johnkosch.com

John Kosch is a composer and arranger currently working in Lincoln, Nebraska. ​His music often uses colorful sonorities, tuneful melodies, and visceral grooves to reflect on his experience with depression and anxiety and ponder timeless questions about human existence, purpose, and struggle. Kosch has received several honors for his compositions, including: The Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award, a Student Downbeat Award, first place in the NAfME Young Composers Competition, a merit award from the Tribeca New Music Young Composer Competition, and an honorable mention from Austin Classical Guitar. He is a two-time finalist for the American Prize, and his works have been selected for performances at regional and national Society of Composers conferences, as well as the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival, Brevard Music Festival, Charlotte New Music Festival, and the Cortona Sessions for New Music. He currently teaches applied composition at Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska.

If you wish to commission John, please send an e-mail to johnkosch@johnkosch.com . Whether you need an original work or an arrangement, all requests are welcome!

Compositions

Fallen Angel
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Fallen Angel explores the idea that surface beauty does not equate to virtue. Rather, beauty can corrupt, as it does in this piece, spawning something hideous and deviant. This work is loosely inspired by biblical texts and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Outbreak
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Outbreak pits music of disparate styles against each other, taking the listener on a transformative journey. This piece challenges audiences to break away from the mundane and experience sublimity by surrendering to carefully constructed chaos— no matter how far it seems we have wondered from our starting point, there are always familiar themes close by.
Per Aspera
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The state motto of Kansas is “Ad astra per aspera,” which roughly translates, “To the stars through hardship.” Per Aspera combines settings of texts by Kansas-based poets that address the challenges of emotional turmoil and mental illness.