George Papajohn (b. 1998, Milwaukee) is a composer and clarinetist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His music transforms fragments of tradition into dense, polyphonic landscapes where gestures of the common practice are fractured, destabilized, and made to speak anew. Tonality is present yet unreliable, collapsing and contradicting itself amid overlapping logics.
Recent projects include collaborations with Switch~ Ensemble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Hinge Quartet, Eco Ensemble, Masso Quartet, the Northwestern University Contemporary Music Ensemble, Nicholas Isherwood, Théo Ould, and Sarah Grace Graves. He also maintains a longstanding creative partnership with Cameron Roberts and Julia Ansolabehere—both as soloists and together as Garden Unit Duo. As a clarinetist, George continues to perform actively, equally at home improvising and interpreting notated scores.
He earned his Bachelor of Music in composition from Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, where he studied with Alex Mincek, Hans Thomalla, and Jay Alan Yim. He is now completing his Ph.D. in composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned his M.A., working under the guidance of Ken Ueno. His research emphasizes the primacy of audible structure over compositional systems in the analysis of post-tonal music.
George Papajohn: Composer 