John Andrew Wilhite

Listening Ecologies

Norwegian Academy of Music

Keywords: Zoomusicology, political ecology, interspecies, improvisation

 

The project initiates live musical collaborations with codfish, intertwining methodologies from contemporary music, zoomusicology, and political ecology. The project strives to investigation the connections between humanity and the more-than-human world while intervening artistically in the ecological crisis of the North Sea's disappearing cod population, while asking critical questions of how both science and industry relate to fish and the sounds they make.

 

John Andrew Wilhite is an Oslo-based composer, double bassist, and sound artist whose projects engage with a wide range of found sounds archival, and field recordings.


His compositions and arrangements have been performed at series and festivals such as Barents Spektakel, Sacred Realism, METEOR, and the Ultima Festival. Often working with large-scale and interdisciplinary projects, he is a recipient of a commission from The Norwegian National Opera, Norwegian Center for Technology in Art and Music, Motvind, Only Connect/Munch Museum, and was a featured artist at Nordic Arts Lab. As a performer, John Andrew works regularly with artists such as Elliott Sharp and the Andreas Røysum Ensemble.


Since 2018, John Andrew has led the scientific-artistic project Torsketromming with scientist Rebekah Oomen.


John Andrew holds master's degrees in both double bass performance and composition from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he studied with Håkon Thelin (bass) and Trond Reinholdtsen (composition), and at Reed College (Portland, Oregon), where he studied with David Schiff. He studied at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music (New York) as a pupil of Reggie Workman. John Andrew studied Slavic art and philosophy. He worked for philosopher Boris Groys at NYU and was a research assistant to Evgenii Berstein at Reed College.