BIOS

COMPOSERS

Bill Alves – is a composer, writer, and video artist based in Southern California. He has written extensively for conventional acoustic instruments, non-Western instruments – especially Indonesian gamelan – and electronic media – especially in the integration of music with abstract animation. CDs of his audio works include The Terrain of Possibilities (EMF) and Imbal-Imbalan (Spectral Harmonies), and his video works are distributed by the Iota Center. He is the author of the book, Music of the Peoples of the World, the second edition of which was been released by Cengage/Schirmer in Fall 2008. Other writings have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Computer Music Journal, SEAMUS Journal, 1/1, and elsewhere. In 1993-94 he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellow in Indonesia, where he extensively studied the gamelan orchestra music of Java and Bali. He currently directs the HMC American Gamelan, an ensemble of specially tuned Javanese instruments dedicated to the performance of new, non-traditional music. He is one of the organizers of MicroFest, the annual Southern California festival of new music in alternate tunings. He holds a D.M.A. and M.A. degrees in Composition from the University of Southern California, and currently teaches at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges in Southern California.


Ni Ketut Arini,
guest dance director, is one of Bali’s most well-known, well-loved teachers and performers, and an expert on classical Balinese female-style dance. She is widely regarded as a living national treasure of Indonesia. Her role in the evolution of 20th century Balinese dance continues to be central. She directly participated in the development, dissemination, and transmission of many of the 20th century pieces that are now the core repertoire for Balinese dancers in the kebyar and legong genres. Ms. Arini holds a Masters Degree in dance from ISI, the Indonesian Academy of Dance in Jogjakarta, Java. She held the position of senior faculty member at Bali’s National High School for the Performing Arts (SMKI) from 1996 until 2004. She directs her own dance school Sanggar Warini, where she teaches hundreds of students, many of whom go on to have professional dance careers. She has taught and performed internationally, including tours and residencies in Taiwan, Malaysia, Japan, Europe, and the United States. She has been a guest dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher with Gamelan Sekar Jaya in several residencies over the past two decades. During that time she choreographed, performed, and designed costumes for several large-scale productions, including Kawit Legong: Prince Karna’s Dream.


Yu-Hui Chang
, composer – has been recognized by numerous prestigious institutions, such as the Aaron Copland Award from the Copland House, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and with fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. Awards abroad include Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize from the Asian Composers League, and a composition award from the Council for Cultural Affairs of the Executive Yuan (Taiwanese government agency).

Yu-Hui’s compositions have been performed across continents in the Netherlands, Italy, UK, China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and throughout the U.S. Using a decidedly contemporary language of diverse harmonic color, inventive timbre and ingenious effects, her music effortlessly resonates with professional musicians and audiences alike, leading to numerous commissions, including those from the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Earplay, Alea III, Volti, Triple Helix Piano Trio, Ju Percussion Group, the Tone-Melody Flute Ensemble, Chamber Music Now, the Arts Council Korea, the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, the National Chiang Kai-Shek Cultural Center of Taiwan, the 2003 Seoul International Festival of Women in Music Today, Brandeis Theater Company, cellist Rhonda Rider, percussionist Chris Froh, and violist Lois Martin.

A native of Taiwan, Yu-Hui began her intensive music training in piano, voice, and music theory at the age of six, and started seriously pursuing composition as a career at the age of fourteen. After graduating from the National Taiwan Normal University, she came to the United States in 1994 and received her graduate degrees from Brandeis University (Ph.D.) and Boston University (M.M.). Now a composition faculty member at Brandeis University, Yu-Hui taught at the University of California-Davis between 1999-2006 and co-directed the Empyrean Ensemble, a professional new music ensemble in residence at the UCD Music Department. www.yuhuichang.com


David Cope,
Dickerson Emeriti Professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, teaches theory and composition, and is Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Xiamen University (China). He also teaches regularly in the annual Workshop in Algorithmic Computer Music (WACM) held in June – July at UC Santa Cruz. He was born in San Francisco, California on May 17, 1941. Following early study on piano (including an extensive performance career) and violoncello, he completed degrees in composition at Arizona State University and the University of Southern California studying with George Perle, Halsey Stevens, Ingolf Dahl and Grant Fletcher. His over 70 published compositions have received thousands of performances throughout the U.S. and abroad, including those by the Vermont, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cabrillo Music Festival, and Santa Cruz Symphony Orchestras, as well as numerous university orchestras and wind ensembles. His compositions include 13 symphonies, 10 string quartets, and 9 piano sonatas. Twenty-one of Cope's works appear on recordings including Variations (piano and wind orchestra; Cornell University), Re-Birth (concert band), Concert (piano and orchestra, Mary Jane Cope, soloist) and Threshold and Visions (orchestra). Complete albums of his music have appeared on Folkways (2), Opus One and Discant Records and include a wide diversity of works from large ensembles to soloists with electronic and computer-generated tape. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope


Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was one of the great composers of the 20th century – a pioneer in the use of alternate tunings, world music influences, and new instruments. Born in Portland, Oregon, Harrison studied in San Francisco with Henry Cowell, and, while still in his twenties, composed extensively for dance and percussion. With another Cowell student, John Cage, Harrison established the first concert series devoted to new music for percussion. In 1942, Harrison moved to Los Angeles to study with the famous Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA. Steeped in the atonal avant-garde of Schoenberg's school, he moved to New York the following year, where he made a name for himself not only as a composer, but also as a critic under the tutelage of composer/writer Virgil Thomson. Harrison also worked at editing the scores of American composer Charles Ives and conducted the first performance of Ives's Third Symphony (which won Ives the Pulitzer Prize). However, the stress and noise of New York led to a nervous breakdown in 1947. To help his friend recover, Cage recommended him to Black Mountain College in rural North Carolina, where the quiet and idyllic setting proved conducive to studies in Harrison's new interests, Asian music and tuning. In 1953, he moved back to California and (then) rural Aptos, where he resided for the rest of his life. Despite his relative isolation from the music world, in the 1950s Harrison completed a remarkable set of works exploring new tunings and approaches to tonality. In 1961, he was invited to the East-West Music Encounter, a conference in Tokyo, which proved a leaping-off point for extensive studies of Asian music, first in Seoul, then in Taiwan.

In the 1980s, with the rise of interest in the ‘new tonality’ and world music, the world began to catch up with Lou Harrison, who by the time of his death was recorded on dozens of CDs and was the subject of many festivals and tributes. As a composer, artist, poet, calligraphist, and peace activist, Lou Harrison dedicated his life to bringing beauty into the world, and those of us who remember his warm generosity, his integrity of spirit, and his irrepressible joyfulness, owe a great debt of gratitude that he did.


Andrew Imbrie
(1921-2007) – Born in New York in 1921, Andrew Imbrie began piano studies at the age of 4 with Ann Abajian, and continued for many years with Leo and Pauline Ornstein, and pianist Robert Casadesus (1941). He studied composition with Nadia Boulanger (1937) and with Roger Sessions at Princeton University (BA in 1942). During World War II he was a Japanese translator in the Army (1944-1946) and then followed Sessions to the University of California, Berkeley (MA 1947). After the Prix de Rome fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, he joined the music faculty at Berkeley in 1949 until his retirement in 1991, the year he was Composer-in-Residence at Tanglewood.

In 1970 he also joined the faculty of the San Francisco conservatory and variously held distinguished visiting professorships at the University of Alabama, as well as Chicago, Brandeis, Harvard, Northwestern, and New York universities. Imbrie has composed works for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, and stage, and his music has been praised for its profound integrity, ardent expression, and an intense drive and conviction. Imbrie's list of prestigious commissions and honors begins from his earliest days as a composition student. The first of his five string quartets, written while at Princeton, won the New York Music Critics' Circle Award in 1944. Other commissions include works for the New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Halle Orchestra, San Francisco Opera, the Naumburg Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Pro Arte Quartet. His awards include the Prix de Rome, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and The Walter M. Naumburg Recording Award. A CD recording of his Requiem, on the Bridge label, was nominated for a Grammy Award. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1969) and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1980), as well as a member  on the board of directors for the Koussevitzky Foundation. He died in Berkeley on Dec. 5, 2007.

Imbrie's music is atonal, but not serial, and is marked by strong contrapuntal and rhythmic interest. It also requires focus. As he told an interviewer (San Francisco Chronicle, 2001): “A piece can be fairly complex, but I believe that there's a deal you make with your audience. You make the piece as clear as you can, and they have to give it their undivided attention. And if you both keep to the deal, then there's a real communication going on.”


David Evan Jones
is a composer with publications in chamber opera, chamber music, computer music, and contemporary music theory. Some of his theoretical and compositional work focuses on structural relationships between phonetics and music.

Jones has worked extensively in computer music, composing in residence at the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm, at L'Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) in Paris, and at Bregman Electronic Music Studio at Dartmouth College (USA) where he co-founded, with Jon Appleton, the Dartmouth graduate program in Electro-Acoustic Music.
Jones' compositions have been recognized by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the New Hampshire Arts Council. He has been honored by a first prize award in the Premio Ancona International Composition Competition (Italy), first prize in the national competition sponsored by the American New Music Consortium, and first prize in the MACRO International Composition Competition (USA). He has received Honorable Mentions in the Prix Ars Electronica, Austria, and in the Bourges (France) Electro-Acoustic Music Competition.
His articles have appeared in Perspectives of New Music and Computer Music Journal. His compositions are published by Dorn Publications, American Composers Editions, and on compact disks from Wergo Records, Centaur Records, Contemporary Recording Studios, Musical Heritage Society, and Composers Recordings Inc.

His first chamber opera, Bardos, received its professional premiere at Hoam Hall in Seoul, Korea in 2004. He has recently published a CD of Neo-Balkan Jazz and Concert Music on Centaur Records and is at work on a second CD of recent chamber music.

Jones is Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/Jones


Hi Kyung Kim
received a B.A. in composition  from Seoul National University,
and the M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.   As a recipient of the U.C. Berkeley's George C. Ladd Prix de Paris, she worked as a composer-in-residence at Institut de Rechéreche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM) and École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1988-1990.   Her composition teachers were Sung-Jae Lee (SNU), Andrew Imbrie, Olly Wilson (U.C. Berkeley), and Gérard Grisey (Paris).   Currently she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and artistic director of the Pacific Rim Music Festival.

 She has received the Walter Hinrichen Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Fromm Music Foundation commission at Harvard University, a Fulbright Scholar award, a Commissioning USA grant from Meet the Composer, and grants from the University of California Inter-Campus Arts Program which made possible the establish the Pacific Rim Music Festival in  1996  at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
    
Kim’s compositions have been performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, San Francisco Symphony, Cabrillo Music Festival Orchestra, Tanglewood Music Center, Rohnert Park Symphony, University of California, Berkeley Symphony, Speculum Musicae, Antara, Millennium Chamber Players, EarPlay, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Ensemble Parallèle, Empyrean Ensemble, Alexander String Quartet, New Asia String Quartet, Aki Takahashi-Rae Imamura, Fonteneau-Sackett Duo, Yarn-Wire, Other Minds Festival, BluePrint Festival, San Francisco International Arts Festival, New American Music Festival, Symposium of the International Musicological Society in Melbourne, Australia, Inter Cultural Creativity Festival in Sydney,  Australia, Asia Society New York, International Women Composers’ Festival, Pan Music Festival, Sound Clock Contemporary Music Ensemble, International Music Festival at Chopin Institute in Warsaw, Poland, Pacific Rim Music Festival, Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea, Asian Music Festivals in Japan, Israel, Korea, and others.

Her recent projects have included three major multi-media works titled “Rituels” for Korean Choreography, Korean Ensemble and Western Ensemble. These were featured internationally at many different venues, including Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, Herbst Theatre in San Francisco, National Center for Korean Traditional Performing Arts in Seoul from 2001 to 2005.  A new work, THOUSAND GATES  is planned to be presented in 2011.  Kim has collaborated with number of Korean artists including Aeri Ji (gayageum), Jeong-Seung Kim (daegeum), Soo-Neon Chung (haegeum), Eun-Ha Park (percussion/dance), and Aeju Lee (dance), and  presented the Festival for Korean Gayageum and Western Instruments in 2007 and premiere concerts with the Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea (director, Jiyoung Yi) in 2010.

Kim completed an unfinished work of her teacher, the late Andrew Imbrie, Clarinet Quintet.  The piece was commissioned by Harvard Musical Association and was premiered by Richard Stolzman and Borromeo String Quartet in December, 2009.  She is working on commissions including a project for Chamber Music Society of Minnesota (second piece of the group), Requiem for Chamber Orchestra Ensemble Parallèle and Chamber Music Singers of UCSC, solo piano piece for Aki Takahashi,  as well as a project for multi-disciplinary collaborative work.

Hi Kyung Kim’s music is published through C.F. Peters Edition and Soo Moon Dang publishing in Korea, and CDs are released by Albany Records, Centaur Records, and Capstone Records.
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/kim/


Sung-Ki Kim received his B.M. and M.M. degrees from the college of music, Seoul National University with professor Sung-Jae Lee. After completion of the degree, he studied composition with J. Casterede of the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris (Diplome superieur de composition) with a scholarship from the French government, and studied fugue with M. Bitsch of the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique de Paris (Premier prix de fugue).

Currently he is professor at the School of Music, Korean National University of Arts.


Geonyong Lee
was born in Pyongannam-do, Korea, on September 30, 1947. His family moved to Seoul in 1953 where he grew up and studied. Taking an early interest in music, he started composing at the age of 12 and played the oboe with the school band at the Seoul Middle School. In high school, he studied composition with Dai-Sung Kim at the Seoul High School of Music and Arts, and with Sung-jae Lee at the Seoul National University. He did further studies in composition with renowned German composer Heinz Werner Zimmermann at the Frankfurter Hochschule. in Frankfurt-am-Main. He returned to Korea and taught composition at Hosung Women’s University and at the Seoul National University. He currently teaches at the Korea National University of Arts in Seoul.

Lee’s music ranges from art songs to opera and choral music, and from solo pieces to orchestral works. He is one of the pioneers of the use of Korean traditional music instruments in his own musical language and is recognized as a composer who has helped define a unique Korean identity in music. Lee is also acknowledged as one of the leading composers of Asia whose works, both instrumental and vocal, are performed extensively.


Lei Liang
(b.1972) is a Chinese-born American composer of mostly stage and chamber works that have been performed throughout the world. He studied composition with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Robert Cogan, Chaya Czernowin, and Mario Davidovsky, and received degrees from the New England Conservatory of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.). The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Aaron Copland Award, Lei Liang has received commissions from the New York Philharmonic, the Heidelberger Philharmonisches Orchester, the Fromm Music Foundation, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, the Manhattan Sinfonietta, the Ying Quartet, the Meridian Arts Ensemble, Boston Musica Viva, Shanghai Quartet, percussionist Steven Schick, pipa player Wu Man, and pianist Stephen Drury. Lei Liang’s music is released on Telarc International, GM, Spektral, Encounter, Opal Records and Mode Records. As a scholar, he is active in the research and preservation of traditional Asian music. Since 2007, Lei Liang has served as Assistant Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego. www.lei-liang.com


Koji Nakano
– As a composer and an educator, Mr. Koji Nakano's musical activities have included community service and outreach to help bridge Western and Eastern musical cultures. His recent works show the merging of both musical traditions, and make reference to theater, philosophy, rituals and spirituality in a series of compositions entitled Time Song. The Time Song series reflects his current interest in, and ongoing research of Mr. Nakano's native musical and theatre culture, including Gagaku music and Bugaku dance, the Noh drama, as well as a variety of folk singing and instrumental techniques in Shakuhachi, Biwa, Shamisen and Taiko.

Mr. Nakano has composed more than 30 works including solo pieces, chamber works, symphonic movements, operas, as well as concerti for piano and violin. Nakano's works have been premiered at the Tanglewood, Aspen, Bowdoin, June in Buffalo, Round Top and Vancouver music festivals. In New York City, his compositions have been performed at Merkin, Weill, and Cami Halls; in Boston at Jordan Hall; in Tokyo at Triphony Hall; in Vancouver at Scotiabank Dance Centre; in Brussels at Maene Piano Salon and in the Netherlands at Arnold Schoenberg Hall.


Paul Nauert began activities in composition and piano performance around the age of 10, and received national awards in composition from Music Teachers National Association and Broadcast Music, Inc. during his pre-college career. He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music, where he was awarded the McCurdy Prize in composition, and Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. in music theory in 1997 with the assistance of a Mellon Foundation Fellowship. His early interest in interdisciplinary pursuits led to an additional undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering (University of Rochester), with an emphasis on signal processing, during his Eastman years.

In 1996, Nauert joined the music faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches music theory and composition. He has published articles on a variety of topics including computer models of musical rhythm, pitch structure in post-tonal music, and the theories of Joseph Schillinger and their influence on the composer George Gershwin. He has also created software applications for computer-assisted composition, including the OMTimePack and OMPitchField libraries for IRCAM’s OpenMusic project.

Nauert’s compositions, mainly for solo and small-ensemble forces, reflect an ongoing interest in: intimate/private discourse as a model for musical rhetoric, the coloristic use of harmony, and fluid or eccentric rhythms that resist assimilation to a steady pulse. His music has been performed at venues such as New York’s Merkin Hall, Miller Theater, and Works and Process at the Guggenheim Museum, as well as the BGSU New Music & Art Festival in Ohio, the SoundField Festival in Chicago, Resonances at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Stuttgart International Guitar Festival. A recording of his composition Subtext performed by guitarist David Tanenbaum is available from New Music Works (newmusicworks.org). http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/nauert


I Gede Oka Artha Negara,
guest music director, is an accomplished composer, choreographer, dancer, and musician from Bali, Indonesia. He is the Artistic Director and a leading performer in Gamelan Suar Agung, acknowledged as one of the finest and most influential jegog ensembles. Hailing from West Bali in the village of Sangkaragung, Negara, he began studying Balinese performing arts as a child under the tutelage of his father I Ketut Suwentra, a renowned artist and the founder of Suar Agung. He continued his studies at ISI Denpasar (Bali’s National Academy of the Arts), where he specialized in composition and bamboo music. In Suar Agung, he has taken on many of the teaching responsibilities and has led the group in prominent festivals throughout Indonesia, Japan, and Europe, performing in events such as the International Gamelan Festival in Amsterdam. Suar Agung is credited with promoting the rebirth of bamboo music and has gained a reputation as a leading contributor to the genre in their activities of preserving, presenting and teaching rare forms of bamboo music. Mr. Artha considers it his mission to spread appreciation and knowledge of jegog music around the globe.


David Rakowski
was born and raised in St. Albans, Vermont, where he played trombone in high school and community bands, and keyboards in a mediocre rock band. He received his musical training at New England Conservatory, Princeton, and Tanglewood, where he studied with Robert Ceely, John Heiss, Milton Babbitt, Paul Lansky, Peter Westergaard, and Luciano Berio. He spent the four years after graduate school holding down dismal part-time word processing jobs and helping to run the Griffin Music Ensemble in Boston. At the end of those four years, he took a running leap into academia with a one-year appointment at Stanford University. Seven years later, he finished his dissertation.

Rakowski's most widely-traveled music is his ever-expanding collection of high-energy piano etudes, currently numbering 89; these pieces approach the problem of etude from many different angles, be they technical, conceptual, or stylistic; many of them may be viewed on YouTube. He has also written three symphonies, five concertos, three large wind ensemble pieces, a sizable collection of chamber and vocal music, as well as incidental music.

Rakowski's awards include the Rome Prize, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2006 Barlow Prize, and the 2004-2006 Elise L. Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Tanglewood Music Center, Broadcast Music, Inc., Columbia University, the Orleans International Piano Competition (the Chevillion-Bonnaud composition prize), the International Horn Society, and various artist colonies. He has been commissioned by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the U.S. Marine Band, Sequitur, Network for New Music, Koussevitzky Music Foundation (with Ensemble 21 in 1996 and with Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2006), Collage New Music, the Kaufman Center/Merkin Hall, Boston Musica Viva, the Fromm Foundation (twice), Dinosaur Annex, the Crosstown Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, the Riverside Symphony, Parnassus, The Composers Ensemble, Alea II, Alea III, Triple Helix, and others. In 1999 his Persistent Memory, commissioned by Orpheus, was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, and in 2002 his Ten of a Kind, commissioned by “The President's Own” U.S. Marine Band, was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been composer-in-residence at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival, Guest Composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference, and a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. His music is published by C.F. Peters, is recorded on BMOP/sound, New World/CRI, Innova, Americus, Albany, Capstone, and Bridge, and has been performed worldwide.

After his year at Stanford, he taught at Columbia University for six years, and then skipped town to join the faculty of Brandeis University, where he is now the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Composition. While on the faculty of Brandeis, he has also taken part-time appointments teaching at Harvard University (twice) and New England Conservatory (also twice). Now a failed trombonist, he lives in Boston exurbia and in Maine with his wife Beth Wiemann and two cats named Sunset and Camden.


Nano S
(Nano Suratno, known professionally simply as Nano S) is known throughout Indonesia as a remarkably prolific composer of both traditional and modern Sundanese music. His compositions have brought a whole new generation of Sundanese to discover the richness of their musical traditions, and to hear it in a new way. He has an advanced degree in music from SMKI-Bandung (the Indonesian High School of Performing Arts in West Java’s capital), where he studied Sundanese music under the tutelage of Mang Koko Koswara, the great innovator of Sundanese music. In 1966, he began composing songs especially designed to suit the tastes of the young, who, he thought, were too easily lured away by Western-style pop and rock. Nano has composed more than 400 songs, 200 of which have been recorded. His span in divergent music genres and his popularity with a broad range of audiences is remarkable, and he has been awarded numerous government and international awards. He is also well regarded as an experimental composer. Nano has also pioneered the use of gamelaninstruments in combination with other Sundanese ensembles (such as angklung and kecapi), a form he calls Karawitan Gending. Nano has toured extensively, performing in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, Canada, and Saudi Arabia (both with and without his group Gentra Madya). He first came to UCSC in 1990 as a composer in residence, creating for Undang Sumarna, Linda Burman-Hall and the UCSC Gamelan the well-known piece Warna. On his return in 2008, Nano worked not only in the familiar context of the West Javanese gamelan, but also became the first Sundanese composer to create new music for Balinese instruments. A consortium of 4 colleges and universities sponsored his residency in 2008.


Laurie San Martin
is a composer, teacher and sometimes-performer of music. Her work has been described as filled with “dark harmonic coloring, starkly contrasting contrapuntal lines, potent sonic effects, and having a vibrant sense of drama.” She writes for solo and chamber ensembles but also enjoys writing for orchestra when the opportunity presents itself. Having played clarinet in orchestra for many years, she often feels that her chamber music imitates the orchestra by trying to carve out a larger space – by prolonging many layers of activity, using varied timbres and a slower harmonic rhythm. Her music often balances sections of intense drama with sections that are slow, contemplative and lyrical.

Laurie’s music has been performed in the U.S. and in Italy by such ensembles as Speculum Musicae, eighth blackbird, EARPLAY, the Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. She has received awards from the League-ISCM, the International Alliance for Women in Music, the Margaret Blackwell Memorial Prize in Composition, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and honorable mention from the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer’s Awards. As a composition fellow, she has attended the MacDowell Colony, May in Miami, Norfolk Contemporary Chamber Music Festival, the Quartet Scholarship Program in Park City, Utah (under the tutelage of Joan Tower and the Muir Quartet), the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Future projects include new works for New York soprano Haleh Abghari with video, a new work for the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, a chamber ensemble piece for the Sequitur ensemble, a new work for Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, and a new piece for gayageum and string quartet for Jiyoung Yi and the Lydian String Quartet as part of the Pacific Rim Music Festival.

Laurie San Martin is a faculty member in the University of California, Davis Music Department where she teaches music theory and composition and co-directs the Empyrean Ensemble. A native of Berkeley, she holds degrees from UC Davis, UC Berkeley and Brandeis University where she studied composition, clarinet, and conducting. She resides in Woodland, California with her two young daughters and her husband, Sam Nichols. www.music.ucdavis.edu/people/laurie-san-martin


Ken Ueno
Winner of the 2006-2007 Rome Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer and vocalist whose wide range of innovative works have been thrilling audiences around the world. Of a performance in Atlanta, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has said: “The evening was redeemed by the last work...Blood Blossoms...composed last year by Boston-based, Ken Ueno...a young composer worth following…” The Boston Globe remarked upon the premiere of his overtone concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, “It was the evening's far-out highlight.” Informed by his experience as an electric guitarist and overtone singer, his music fuses the culture of Japanese underground electronic music with an awareness of European modernism. In an effort to feature inherent qualities of sound such as beatings, overtones, and artifacts of production noise, Ken’s music is often amplified and uses electronics.

Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, Frances-Marie Uitti, the American Composers Orchestra (Whitaker Reading Session), the Cassatt Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Atlas Ensemble, Relâche, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, Dogs of Desire, the Orkest de Ereprijs, and the So Percussion Ensemble. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, the Takefu International Music Festival, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival, where he was guest composer/lecturer.

A former ski patrol and West Point cadet, Ken holds degrees from Berklee College of Music, Boston University, the Yale School of Music, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is a co-founder/co-director of the Minimum Security Composers Collective. Currently, Ken is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor and the Director of the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. www.kenueno.com


Chinary Ung
Chinary Ung was the first American composer to win the highly coveted and international Grawemeyer Award (1989), sometimes called the Nobel Prize for music composition. Among other honors, Ung has received awards from The Kennedy Center (Friedheim award), The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Asia Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, Joyce Foundation, and The National Endowment for the Arts.

His, SPIRAL XII: “Space Between Heaven and Earth” premiered at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, in November 2008, by The Los Angeles Master Chorale. Ung has been a featured composer/master composer at prominent festivals/conferences, including: Asia Society, The World Music Institute's Interpretations Series – Four Generations of Asian Composers; 2007 Asian Composers League in Seoul, Korea: The 3Oth ACL Forum in Seoul, Korea; 2008 AURORA Festival, Sydney, Australia; Panel/Concert at The Library of Congress; Thailand International Composition Festival at Burapha University, Thailand; and in 2009, Other Minds: OM 14 Festival, San Francisco.

Chinary Ung has received many commissions including those from the Philadelphia Orchestra; Meet the Composer, Koussevitzky Foundation, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and La Jolla Summerfest and Santa Fe Summer Music Festivals. Ung's music is published by C. F. Peters Corporation and is a member of Broadcast Music Incorporated.

His music is recorded on New World Records, Bridge Records, Cambria, London Records, Other Minds, Oodiscs, Nami Records, Kojima Records, Albany Records, Norton Recordings, Composers Recording Incorporated, Folkways Records, and Koch International.


Edgard Varèse
(1883-1965) – Varèse studied with d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum (1903-1905) and Widor at the Paris Conservatoire (1905-1907). He then moved to Berlin, where he met Strauss and Busoni. In 1913, he returned to Paris, but in 1915 he immigrated to New York. Nearly all of his compositions disappeared at this stage, with the exception of a single published song and an orchestral score, Bourgogne (1908), which he took with him – but destroyed towards the end of his life. His creative output therefore effectively begins with Amériques for large orchestra (1921), which, for all its echoes of Debussy and of Stravinsky's early ballets, sets out to discover new worlds of sound: fiercely dissonant chords, rhythmically complex polyphonies for percussion and/or wind, forms in continuous evolution with no large-scale recurrence.

In 1921, he and Carlos Salzedo founded the International Composers' Guild. The Guild gave the first performances of several of his works for small ensemble. These prominently featured wind and percussion, and presented the innovations of Amériques in pure, compact form with: Hyperprism (1923), Octandre (1923) and Intégrales (1925). His piece, Arcana (1927), returns to the large orchestra in an extended form, with perfected technique, which brought this productive period to an end.

There followed a long stay in Paris (1928-1933), during which he wrote, Ionisation, for percussion orchestra (1931), the first European work to dispense almost entirely with pitched sounds, which enter only in the coda. He also took an interest in the electronic instruments being developed (he had been calling for electronic means since his arrival in the USA), and wrote for two theremins or ondes martenot in Ecuatorial for bass, brass, keyboards and percussion (1934). The flute solo Density 21.5 (1936) was then his last completed work for nearly two decades. During this time he taught sporadically and also made plans for Espace, which was to have involved simultaneous radio broadcasts from around the globe; an Etude pour Espace for chorus, pianos and percussion was performed in 1947. Then, with electronic music at last a real possibility owing to the development of the tape recorder, he produced Déserts for wind, percussion and tape (1954) and a Poème électronique (1957-1958), devised to be diffused in the Philips pavilion at the Brussels Exposition of 1958. His last years were devoted to projects on themes of night and death, including the unfinished Nocturnal for voices and chamber orchestra (1961).


Chou Wen-chung
  has received numerous awards, grants, and commissions, including the 1996 University of Cincinnati Award for Excellence, the 1991-92 John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award, the 1985 China Institute Qingyun Award, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, two Guggenheim fellowships, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, a Koussevitsky Music Foundation commission, a New York State Council on the Arts commission, a National Endowment for the Arts commission, a Louisville Orchestra commission, and a commission from the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition at Brigham Young University. In 1982, Chou Wen-chung was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Chou Wen-chung’s compositions, published by C. F. Peters, have been performed by orchestras throughout the world, including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Orchestre National (Paris), Sinfonica de Radio Nacional (Buenos Aires), Japan Philharmonic Symphony (Tokyo), and Central Philharmonic (Beijing). His Landscapes for orchestra (finished in 1949 and premiered by Leopold Stokowski with the San Francisco Symphony in 1953), is often cited as the first composition that is independent of either Western or Eastern musical grammar. Subsequently, his research for integration of musical concepts and practices led to his ever-evolving theory on his pien (variable) modes, influenced by concepts found in yin-yang and I Jing theories, Dao philosophy, brush calligraphy, and qin (Chinese zither) music, as well as early and modern European theories. The most prominent disciple of the composer Edgard Varèse, Chou is known as one of the few early pioneers of East/West artistic integration.

Chou Wen-chung was born in Yantai, China, in 1923 to a family steeped in the wenren (men of the arts) tradition. He came to the United States in 1946. Chou is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and honorary member of the International Society for Contemporary Music and of the Asian Composers League. He was honored in 2001 by the French government with the order of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. Chou’s latest work, the Second String Quartet “Streams”, premiered in New York City in April 2004. Most recently, he was awarded the 2005 Robert Stevenson Prize for research on the relationship between ethnomusicology and composition. www.chouwenchung.org


Charles Wuorinen
(b. June, 9 1938, New York City) has been composing since he was five and has been a forceful presence on the American musical scene for more than four decades.

In 1970, Wuorinen became the youngest composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in music for Time's Encomium, an electronic composition written on commission from Nonesuch Records. The Pulitzer and the MacArthur Fellowship are just two among many awards, fellowships and other honors to have come his way.

Wuorinen has written more than 250 compositions to date. His newest works include Time Regained, a fantasy for piano and orchestra for Peter Serkin, James Levine and the MET Opera Orchestra, Second Piano Quintet for Peter Serkin and the Brentano Quartet, Eighth Symphony for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Fourth Piano Sonata for Anne-Marie McDermott and Synaxis for four soloists, strings and timpani. Upcoming projects include an opera on Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain.” Wuorinen’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, based on the novel of Salman Rushdie, was premiered by the New York City Opera in Fall 2004.

His works have been recorded on nearly a dozen labels including several releases on Naxos, Albany Records (Charles Wuorinen Series), John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and a CD of piano works performed by Alan Feinberg on the German label Col Legno.

Wuorinen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. www.charleswuorinen.com