Jonathan Chase

Jonathan Beard creates music for media and the concert stage. As a composer, his recent projects include scoring the feature film Frank vs. God; serving on the composing teams for video games Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Old Republic: Knights Of The Fallen Empire; and guest-composing for ABC's Once Upon A Time. For the stage, Jonathan co-composed the oratorio The Passion Of Anne Frank for the Los Angeles Master Chorale as part of their Voices Within residency, and his original theatre-score for Driving Miss Daisy received an NAACP Theatre Award nomination. He also recently completed the I-Park Foundation Artist Residency for his in-progress electroacoustic opera Cesare, Child Of Night.

The hunting horn evolved in the seventeenth century as an accessory to a popular leisure activity for the aristocracy—the hunt. Its purpose during the chase was to signal unfolding events to people walking behind the mounted huntsmen; it was designed to be loud enough to project over considerable distance and over the barking of hunting hounds. From this rustic beginning, the horn underwent a remarkable process of taming and refinement over a few decades to become capable of being the featured musical instrument of chamber works in the eighteenth century, such as those recorded here. The music may still retain occasional references to its outdoor heritage in brief fanfares and hunting rhythms, but horn players achieved an ability to blend and balance with small groups of string instruments, harpsichord and woodwinds, with an emphasis on sweetness of tone, phrasing and articulation that would have been unanticipated a generation or so earlier.