Opera

John Andrew works often with opera. Opera for John Andrew offers a format to explore the theater of history, which includes history as a system of signs and objects, a completely external humanity which tends towards the utopian directed towards the living & history as a phantasmagoria of human desires projected onto the dead. John Andrew's work problematizes our engagement with historical material and forms: not only musical forms, but also larger aesthetic forms such as the archive and the museum.

John Andrew has completed 4 operas, most recently "Kunngjøringer fra Pariserkommunen" for The Norwegian National Opera, with premier at Ultima 2022. Excerpts of this work have been shown at Brecht Tage 2021. For these works John Andrew often collaborates with playwright Finn Iunker and Bernhard Bornstein. 

Links to excerpts:

Historical Materialism

Eternity and its Double 

Walter Benjamins død i Portbou 

Double Bass Works

John Andrew is developing a new way of playing the double bass. By using both hands on the fingerboard, john is able to achieve pianistic agility while sounding up to four simultaneous bi-tones. John is exploring the harmonic implications of these bi-tone relations, and how they fit with and/or alter the harmonic relationships of the strings in fourths tuning. John Andrew also is exploring how these techniques relate to other musical languages such as jazz and american folk music. John Andrew has installed pickups in his fingerboard in order to be able to amplify and record these bi-tone relationship.

Read more about this work on Research Catalogue.

Extra-musical

In much of his work, John Andrew uses microphones and pickups in order to make audible hidden relationships. In addition to using microphones in his operas and double bass work, John Andrew is currently working on recordings in the city of Paris, as a long term project on codfish mating calls. Read more about how "Torsketromming" (cod drumming) is breaking ground in both music and science:

Article from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

Follow our Codfish project on instagram.

Or visit the facebook, or website.

Scenekunst/Theater

John enjoys collaboration, and often works with dance and theater.

Here are some example links to a few productions:

Gold in All My Veins, by Carima Neusser, Sara Gurevitsch, Carola Uehlken, and John Andrew Wilhite in Outokumpu, Finland. 

Finn Iunker's Føniks 4 at METEOR 2017, Bergen, Norway.

Other Compositions

John Andrew has written works for, among other things harpsichord, symphony orchestra, jazz ensemble, antique objects, and unusual quartets.