Composer Jonathan Berger writes music in many genres but has twin specialties in opera and in music inspired by conjunctions of science and the human condition. He is also an educator and a researcher with many academic papers to his credit.

Berger was born in New York in 1954. He earned a master's degree from the California Institute of the Arts and a Doctor of Musical Arts in composition from Stanford University. Berger went on to teach at Stanford, where he taught courses in computers and music. He co-founded the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (now the Stanford Arts Institute) and was the founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology. Some of his early compositions, such as The Lead Plates of the Rom Press for electronic cello and computer (1990), involved electronics and computer technology. In addition to composing, Berger is an active researcher who focuses on music and the brain, specifically how humans, sometimes obsessively, become interested in music. In 2006, he founded the Music & Brain Symposium at Stanford.

Berger has composed music in many genres, including orchestral, chamber, vocal, and choral works, as well as electro-acoustic music. He has received commissions from important ensembles, including the Kronos Quartet, the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and the Scharoun Ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as from major organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York, and Westdeutscher Rundfunk radio in Germany. He is perhaps especially notable for his output in the field of opera; several of his operas have garnered multiple performances, including Visitations (2014), which was heard in New York, Boston, and Rome. Some of his works, such as the chamber opera Theotokia (which represents brain activations of a schizophrenic hallucination), explore his interest in brain phenomena. Berger's one-character opera M? Lai refers to the Vietnam War massacre of that name. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and plans to devote resources from that to a cantata based upon folk tales as told by refugees, migrants, and the homeless and to a work based upon acoustic models that approximate and re-create the sounds of extinct species and lost habitats. More than ten of Berger's compositions have been recorded, including M? Lai, which appeared in 2022 on the Smithsonian Folkways label in a performance featuring the Kronos Quartet. ~ James Manheim, Rovi