Jessie Ehlhart (Dutch/Australian) was born in 1972 in Beesd, a village in Gelderland. As the daughter of two pianists, she grew up in an environment where music was a completely natural thing.
As a child, Jessie liked to create her own piano pieces that arose from improvisation and she also performed those pieces in front of an audience. Yet she chose not to train as a musician in her early adulthood. After having lived and worked in Australia for a year when she was 18 years old, she moved to Amsterdam and studied theatre, psychology and music therapy. This resulted in a varied career, working as a music therapist, teacher and self-employed entrepreneur. Yet the proverbial blood appeared to be crawling…
In her teens, Jessie took piano lessons with Willemien Kuitenbrouwer and throughout her twenties enjoyed voice coaching, improvisation and composition classes. Through singing lessons with (among others) Marianne Blok and Caroline Stam, and singing in various ensembles, Jessie Ehlhart developed into a singer at a semi-professional level. In addition, between 2008 and 2010 she contacted Dutch composer Daan Manneke and took composition lessons with the young talented Wilbert Bulsing. After having participated in an artist in residency in France in 2015, Jessie began building an oeuvre by creating autonomous compositions for voice, classical instruments and electronics.
Jessie Ehlhart’s motivations in work and life are development and creation. As a composer Jessie has many sources of inspiration. Religion, personal and spiritual quests and poetry to name a few. The love of language is reflected in her strong affinity with text as a starting point for her music thus creating mostly vocal compositions. Starting often with a textual theme, she seeks to merge form, language and musical expression. Jessie’s shows a special interest in multidisciplinary collaboration and crossover in her work and projects.
A performer of Ehlhart’s work:
Jessie Ehlhart’s music is layered and full of vocal acrobatics. In terms of style, her work can perhaps best be characterized as: a modern mix of the Middle Ages, baroque, folk and pop.
Jessie Ehlhart about her own music:
My grandmother was Hungarian and, in addition to the Dutch, I have the Australian nationality. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that influences from folk music, Celtic music, folk and bluegrass can be found in my work. In addition to all kinds of musical styles that I inherited from my parents (from J.S. Bach to Bill Evans, from Rachmaninov to the Beatles), the work of 20th century composers and artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan have had a great influence on my musical idiom.
My work has been characterized as eclectic. Even though I recognise why that is, I do think that the work of every creative artist is eclectic or at least a consequence of the previous. I rarely take pure innovation as a starting point when composing. Not a theoretical system with which I would like to leave everything that exists ‘behind me’, but experiences from life itself form the filter through which my sound language takes on its own unique shape
