Justin Kennedy
Composer, Performer, & Music Producer
ABOUT ME
I am a composer, performer, and producer with experience in commercial and classical music. I've always enjoyed making music and finding the time to get better at it. I like to think I've advanced my skills pretty well over the years, thanks to some great teachers.
My mom gifted me my first beret when I was young. She always wore one when she owned and operated her photography studio. That studio was special to me. It felt like a place where anything was possible. So, I wear berets during musical activities as a way of summoning the courage to express myself that my mom gave me in that space.
Featured Project
Here is a funky rock song I wrote and recorded with friends. It's something of a love letter to R&B, funk, disco, and rock arranging practices of the 1970s.
I was so fortunate to study with an incredible artist named Leslie Drayton, who made major contributions to those genres during that time (and beyond). He introduced me to the hidden art of contemporary arranging. I had never stopped and really listened to all that incredible orchestration in any of those genres. In order to understand what I was hearing, we started with the greats like Duke Ellington. That set me on a path to find some of the most magnificent treasures in music: transcriptions of orchestrata parts by Paul Riser (My Girl, Ain't No Mountain High Enough) and Nile Rodgers (We Are Family, Good Times).
Studying with Leslie changed my life in more ways than I can explain. Every time I worked on this song, I thought about how one mentor can so meaningfully impact a person's life.
The music video for Make the Change was quite an undertaking. It takes place inside a fictional social media website I fabricated. The site isn't real and neither are any of the people in it, except the musicians.
I wore many hats on this project: composer, lyricist, producer, arranger, synth bass player, backing vocalist, graphic designer, and both video editor and director. Check out the full credits here and sheet music here. Get the song from any of these distributors.
Composition Reels
Commercial & Popular Genres
Classical & Avant Garde
I studied music at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts. I've worked in the commercial market as a composer and producer. It's always fun to learn more about audio in a recording studio! I can write and produce a wide range of commercial styles, having done client work in cyberpunk, new age, R&B, and beyond. I'm also classically trained.
Selected Full-Length Tracks
On the Road, Searching for Answers
Becoming a father was a powerfully transformative experience for me. Before having a child, I was obsessed with career success. I defined myself through my level of recognized achievement. When my kid was born, I went through something of a crisis. I asked myself, "Would I really give up anything for my child?" I was ashamed when I realized I lived my life as if the answer was "no", and resolved to embody a "yes" every day forward. But it was harder than I expected. It felt like driving from dusk till dawn in heavy fog, searching for answers.
2a03
This track is a chiptune written as an homage to Mega Man composers Manami Matsumae and Takashi Tateishi. It is written for live performance in Ableton, through the use of a launchpad and MIDI keyboard. The title is a reference to the Ricoh 2a03 microprocessor used in the Nintendo Entertainment System. The sounds in this piece emulate those produced by that chip. For it, I used a very cool plug-in named Magical 8bit developed by Yokemura. I am considering making a collection of chiptunes like this one.
Drum Factory - Concerto for Drum Set and Orchestra
I wrote a concerto for drum set and orchestra a while back. A teacher of mine, Miguel del Aguila, suggested to me that the piece might not feel like a drum set concerto if I employed the use of melody and purposeful harmony. I was fascinated by this thought. So, for the outside sections, I wrote musical material on drum set, and then had the orchestra echo back those themes using only the elements of rhythm, gesture, dynamics, and timbre. All harmony was incidental. I used a lot of dissonant intervals in an attempt to subvert a key.
The inside section was inspired by Webern's pointillism. The orchestra's motifs were modular little cells, like assembly pieces in a factory. In that same section, the drum set takes four rhythmic cells and in each measure, the cell at the end goes to the beginning, kind of like an assembly line.
I'm so lucky that soloist Nils Higdon has "held the flame" for this piece. He did a phenomenal job performing it. The story of the chamber orchestra is interesting too. I couldn't find an orchestra to premiere Drum Factory, so my friend Aleks Savitski and I recruited all 39 performers, and then put on our own back-to-back recitals.
Sometimes percussionists reach out with interest in writing about this piece or entering concerto competitions with it. That's a great feeling for me. If you are such a person, contact me and I'll send you the scores.
Live Electronic Music
I've been performing my original electronic music internationally for 15 years. I specialize in launchpad and analog synth performance. In my live set, I incorporate non-traditional input methods such as face-tracking and QR code tracking, mapping the data from those sources to control various parameters of sound. I am a seasoned Ableton Live and Max for Live user. My go-to digital instruments include Serum, Massive, Cherry Voltage, Spitfire, and EastWest. In addition to composing and performing my electronic music, I often serve as mixing/mastering engineer for them as well.