Douglas Knehans’s music is about complex relationships that are dramatically established and drawn over large timeframes through a technique he calls deep line. The surface and expressive impact of his music though is about richness and color and critics see it that way too when they say his music “…is radiant and multicolored. This is music of tremendous imagination. Knehans scores with a masterly hand, his sound paintbrush unerringly hitting the mark.” (Fanfare Magazine)
Though first known through his collaboration with director Barrie Kosky in the Opera Australia production of his The Ascension of Robert Flau (1990), he is perhaps best known for his orchestral compositions. In this music the study of orchestral mass, expressive impact and sonic brilliance drive his musical language. Additional to Knehans’s eight large works for orchestra, his music has come to the attention of soloists and orchestras through his four symphonies and twelve concertos for instrument or voice and orchestra. Knehans’s orchestral and other compositions, including opera, have been performed worldwide at major music festivals and been included on a number of solo and compilation recordings. He is also well known for his vocal and choral music that has been performed, awarded and recorded around the world. In this music he is drawn to the expressive and timbral power of language and has set texts in Latin, English, French, German, ancient Aramaic, and Italian, sometimes—as in his evening length Shoah Requiem—drawing on the surface friction that can arise through lingual juxtaposition and interpolation.
Knehans’s creative work in both orchestral and vocal music as well as chamber music and electro-acoustic music draws on his three major sources of theoretical interest—the study of time and memory; the study of human emotion; and the study of the organic and natural world. These three seemingly disparate areas of research coalesce naturally through music. This is because music is based in time and memory; it uses emotion as a major pathway for laying down of musical memory, emotional response, and time comparisons of ideas as they progress through a work, while utilizing the organic and natural world as an evocative, correlative surface for music. These elements can—and again through the use of time, memory and emotion— easily be drawn into a deeper and more crypto-spiritual world of the psycho-emotional by utilizing organic and natural world metaphors for our deeper human existence and struggles.
The creation of sound worlds of great paradox is thus a huge fascination for Knehans. The outward representation of inner psycho-emotional dynamics is of particular interest to him. In seeking to allow fruitful pathways for the understanding and meaning of works, he is increasingly drawn to summative and simple natural or organic symbols and signifiers that allow for a certain ‘pre-coding’ of a work in the mind of the listener: one that relies on time and memory, emotional response and intellectual engagement with organic and natural world metaphors.
His voice is influenced by his Australian-American training which was focused primarily on European music in his Australian undergraduate study at the prestigious Australian National University, and then American music in his American study at Queens College with Thea Musgrave—again also underscoring the European roots of his voice— and then at Yale with Pulitzer prize winning composer Jacob Druckman.
After completing all of his study at ANU, Queens and Yale, Knehans held a professorship at the University of Alabama; was Director and Head of School at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music in Australia and then was appointed the Dean of the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at CCM.
He has received recognition, prizes, and awards for his compositions and recordings from the 2019 ISCM World Music Days; The Center for Contemporary Opera (New York); Opera Dagen Rotterdam 2019; Dark Mofo Festival (Australia); The American Prize; The Kennedy Center; Clouzine International Music Awards; Independent Music Awards; Global Music Awards; The Australia Council for the Arts; The Ohio Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts; Meet the Composer; New Music USA and many others.
He currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio with his wife Josephine. He is interested in cooking, wine, natural and organic food, and is a vegan and committed animal rights advocate who enjoys travel, art, architecture and music.