Jonathan Commisar

Jonathan Comisar’s eclectic music background includes Eastman School of Music (pre-college), Oberlin Conservatory (piano) and composition with Pulitzer Prize winning composer David Del Tredici.  He is currently completing his Masters in classical composition at the Manhattan School of Music and premiered his first work for full orchestra this past week. Comisar is an invested Cantor with a Masters in Sacred Music from the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music and served the Community Synagogue in Rye, NY with distinction from 2000-08.  He is a noted and sought after composer of Jewish themed music throughout North America and served on the faculty of the HUC Debbie Friedman School of Sacred Music.  The American Conference of Cantors, commissioned Comisar to write a composition for their 60th Anniversary, premiered at the URJ Biennial in 2013. Jonathan Comisar is an emerging musical theater composer (Public Theater, Jerry Orbach/Snapple, Don’t Tell Mama) and a member of the prestigious BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.  Comisar’s musical theater piece “Things Are As They Are,” about the life of American photographer Dorothea Lange, was awarded Best of the Festival Audience Favorite Prize at the NY Musical Theater Festival (2010) and was twice nominated for the Fred Ebb Foundation Award, 2009 and 2011.