Welcome to the Pacific Rim Music Festival 2010
"Music from the Past, Music for the Future."
We are excited to present a rich program featuring over thirty composers from both sides of the Pacific, played by a selection of the finest international ensembles and virtuoso soloists, with presentations from world-renowned music experts.
The festival will open with a concert of masterworks by the sonic architect who provided a beacon for the future in the early 20th century, Edgard Varèse, along with his protégé Chou Wen-Chung, performed by Ensemble Parallèle from San Francisco, the UC Santa Cruz Percussion Ensemble and Wind Ensemble.
The finale to our five-day festival will showcase a celebration of traditional and newly written music for various types of gamelan, featuring the Bay Area's Gamelan Sekar Jaya and the UC Santa Cruz gamelan ensembles. In-between we present concerts of music written especially for and performed by the Contemporary Music Ensemble Korea, San Francisco's Del Sol String Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, and Boston's Lydian String Quartet.
A special feature of the Festival is the presentation of world premiere compositions from our Cultural Synthesis Project, written especially for the combination of western and traditional Asian musical instruments. The Cultural Synthesis Project grew out of the "Gayageum Festival" at UCSC, where Western musicians studied the traditional Korean instrument gayageum, learning aesthetics and techniques of the music in order to write for combinations of gayageum and western instruments.
The expansion of this project to include the traditional instruments you will hear at this year's Festival involved hundreds of hours of workshops between the participating artists over the past few years. In this way we attempted to gain a deeper understanding of each other's musical traditions and aesthetic and philosophical values, culminating in the works presented on the concerts you will hear this week.
It is our hope that you will find these works challenging and innovative. We hope to continue workshops like the Cultural Synthesis Project in the future to help us gain a deeper understanding of the music and the people of our nations. Through music we celebrate the common bond of our humanity.
Artistic Director, Hi Kyung Kim