EARLY MUSIC FESTIVAL 2024
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Program
Friday, April 19 7:00pm Twilight Colors (2007) by Chou Wen-Chung Birds in Warped Time (1980) by Somei Satoh An Elder's Hocket (1979) by Jō Kondō The White Peril (1994) by Fred Ho 
Chou Wen-Chung was born in Yantai, China, in 1923, and moved to the United States in 1946. His earliest work, Landscapes, written in 1949, is often cited as the first composition in music history that is independent of either Western or Eastern musical grammar. The piece premiered in 1953 with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and launched the young composer onto a career which steadily gained in momentum over the next two decades.
His unique canon of work, a contemporary expression of the principles of traditional Chinese aesthetics, has had a momentous impact on the development of modern music in Asia and in post-colonial cultures. He exhorted young composers to study their own cultural heritage and warned: “If you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you are going?” His students represent an international mix of accomplished composers, including the acclaimed Tan Dun, Zhou Long, Chen Yi and Bright Sheng. His vision for the music of the future, however, extends far beyond the preservation of any particular heritage. He foresaw a flourishing of creative output, benefitting from a “confluence” of many cultures, but grounded in an understanding of the history and traditions of each. For extensive information on Chou Wen-Chung, his music, philosophy, and writings, visit https://chouwenchung.org/ TWILIGHT COLORS by Chou Wen-Chung Twilight Colors is a double trio for woodwinds and strings, specifically for: Flute, Oboe, and Clarinet in one trio; and Violin, Vila and Violoncello in the other. The woodwind trio is by itself a double trio with some movements written for Alto Flute, English Horn, and Bass Clarinet played by the same performers as a separate entity. Therefore, the movement of the work consist of a string trio in combination with one of two woodwind trios, which offers changing color combinations from movement to movement. The work is inspired by the exceptional colors of the changing sky over the Hudson River Valley which attracted American painters who initiated a school of true landscape painting not dominated by the human figure. In composing the piece I was influenced by the Chinese brush painters of the early 17th century who developed subtle brushstrokes and their sophisticated organization for landscape painting by adopting fundamental brush stroke technique from Chinese calligraphy. The result was an extremely terse and abstract expression of the subject portrayed, and conceivably anticipated much of the abstract and the expressionist development in Western painting of the 20th century, which presumably evolved out of a different aesthetic orientation. The piece consists of a series of vignettes, in four movements, each with a descriptive phrase: “in the darkness, a thread of light,” “through the clouds, colors of dawn,” “trees and rocks in the mist,” and “over the horizon, mountain peaks rising.” There is also a coda, “their silhouettes neither parallel nor contrary.” —Chou Wen-Chung 
Somei Satoh was born in 1947 in Sendai (northern Honshu), Japan. He began his career in 1969 with “Tone Field,” an experimental, mixed media group based in Tokyo. In 1972 he produced “Global Vision,” a multimedia arts festival, that encompassed musical events, works by visual artists and improvisational performance groups. In one of his most interesting projects held at a hot springs resort in Tochigi Prefecture in 1981, Satoh places eight speakers approximately one kilometer apart on mountain tops overlooking a huge valley. As a man-made fog rose from below, the music from the speakers combined with laser beams and moved the clouds into various formations. Satoh has collaborated twice since 1985 with theater designer, Manuel Luetgenhorst in dramatic stagings of his music at The Arts at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, New York.
Satoh was awarded the Japan Arts Festival prize in 1980 and received a visiting artist grant from the Asian Cultural Council in 1983, enabling him to spend one year in the United States. He has written more than thirty compositions, including works for piano, orchestra, chamber music, choral and electronic music, theater pieces and music for traditional Japanese instruments. Somei Satoh is a composer of the post-war generation whose hauntingly evocative musical language is a curious fusion of Japanese timbral sensibilities with 19th century Romanticism and electronic technology. He has been deeply influenced by Shintoism, the writings of the Zen Buddhist scholar DT Suzuki, his Japanese cultural heritage as well as the multimedia art forms of the sixties. Satoh's elegant and passionate style convincingly integrates these diverse elements into an inimitably individual approach to contemporary Japanese music. Of his work, Satoh states: "My music is limited to certain elements of sound and there are many calm repetitions. There is also much prolongation of a single sound. I think silence and the prolongation of sound is the same thing in terms of space. The only difference is that there is either the presence or absence of sound. More important is whether the space is "living" or not. Our [Japanese] sense of time and space is different from that of the West. For example, in the Shinto religion, there is the term 'imanaka' which is not just the present moment which lies between the stretch of past eternity and future immortality, but also the manifestation of the moment of all time which is multi-layered and multi-dimensional .... I would like it if the listener could abandon all previous conceptions of time and experience a new sense of time presented in this music as if eternal time can be lived in a single moment." (from the liner notes by Margaret Leng Tan to New Albion's release, "Litania" NA008) 
Born in Tokyo in 1947, Jō Kondō graduated from the composition department of Tokyo University of Arts in 1972. He spent a year in New York on a scholarship from the John D. Rockefeller III Fund in 1977-78. In 1979 he taught as guest lecturer at University of Victoria, British Columbia, invited by the Canada Council, and in 1986 resided in London as a British Council Senior Fellow. In 1987 he was composer in residence at Hartt School of Music, Hartford, Connecticut, USA, and taught at Dartington International Summer School in England. He is Professor Emeritus of Music at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, and Professor at Showa University of Music, Kawasaki, Japan.
In 1980 Kondo founded the Musica Practica Ensemble, a chamber orchestra devoted to contemporary music, and was artistic director of the group until its disbandment in 1991. He has written more than 130 compositions, ranging from solo pieces to orchestral and electronic works, which have been widely performed in Japan, North America and Europe and recorded on Hat Art, ALM, Fontec, Deutsche Grammophon and other labels. He has received commissions from numerous organisations, and his music has been featured at many international music festivals. Kondo has written extensively on musical matters, and since 1979 he has published five books spelling out in detail his own aesthetic and compositional ideas. He is also an associate editor of Contemporary Music Review. During 2000 he directed the composition classes at the Dartington International School of Music and was on the jury of the Gaudeamus International Composers' competition, and was a featured composer at the 2005 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. The 2011 Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival featured his work. In January 2012 Jo Kondo was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the ceremony he was hailed as one of Japan's most distinguished composers and his distinct style of composition was described thus: 'His music is characterised by a unique personality which synthesizes Japanese aesthetic sensibility and western harmonic structure. Perhaps there are echoes of Morton Feldman, the great American composer, but Kondo's music inhabits a far larger universe, at once serene and dynamic, at once contemplative and energetic.' AN ELDER'S HOCKET by Jō Kondō A hocket is a melody that is split up between different instruments and is a musical technique that has been particularly fascinating to Jo Kondo. An Elder's Hocket, scored for piano, marimba, clarinet, is one of his most popular works employing that technique. 
Fred Ho was an American baritone saxophonist, composer, bandleader, playwright, writer and Marxist social activist. Through his music-making, he sought to define and represent a uniquely Chinese American musical form and practice. The White Peril: Too Wrong for Too Long was written for Zeitgeist as part of the Music in Motion program. It’s four movements include Justice Denied is Justice Died, No Crocodile Tears for Capitalism, It’s Easy to Fall in Love with You, But Love is Not Enough-Can you be my companera? and My Soul Cries Out for Socialism.
Zeitgeist is disappointed with other biographies online of our friend, Fred....except for this one. Bruce Duffie does a beautiful job of making sense of Fred's remarkable life and work. We miss him. Program
Saturday, April 20 7:00pm Rain Tree (1981) by Toru Takemitsu Musica Nara (2006) by Minako Tokuyama ...Like Water (1995) by Bun-Ching Lam Question from Grapefruit (1962) by Yoko Ono 
Toru Takemitsu was born in Tokyo on 8 October 1930. He began attending the Keika Junior High School in 1943 and resolved to become a composer at the age of 16. During the post-war years, he came into contact with Western music through radio broadcasts by the American occupying forces – not only jazz, but especially classical music by Debussy and Copland and even by Schoenberg. He made his debut at the age of 20 with a piano piece Lento in Due Movimenti. Although Takemitsu was essentially a self-taught composer, he nevertheless sought contact with outstanding teachers: Toshi Ichiyanagi acquainted the composer with the European avant-garde of Messiaen, Nono und Stockhausen, and Fumio Hayasaka introduced Takemitsu to the world of film music and forged contacts to the film director Akira Kurosawa for whom Takemitsu produced several scores to film plots. Alongside his musical studies, Takemitsu also took a great interest in other art forms including modern painting, theatre, film and literature (especially lyric poetry). His cultural-philosophical knowledge was acquired through a lively exchange of ideas with Yasuji Kiyose paired with his own personal experiences. In 1951, the group “Experimental Workshop” was co-founded by Takemitsu, other composers and representatives from a variety of artistic fields; this was a mixed media group whose avant-garde multimedia activities soon caused a sensation. Takemitsu taught composition at Yale University and received numerous invitations for visiting professorships from universities in the USA, Canada and Australia. He died in Tokyo on 20 February 1996. Peter Mussbach and the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden commemorated Takemitsu in their staged project "My Way of Life” in 2004.
Takemitsu’s earliest works display influences of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, whereas the compositions of his second creative phase reflect his preoccupation with French Impressionism, particularly Debussy. The composer gained initial recognition at the end of the 1950s with his Requiem for strings (1957) which incorporates serial techniques. Takemitsu’s interest in a wide variety of artistic expressive forms and his individual sense of freedom developed through his autodidacticism shaped the character of his avant-garde style. As early as 1950, he utilised a tape recorder to create musical collages from “real” sounds ("musique concrète": Water Music, 1960; Kwaidan, 1964). In the early 1960s, two new elements appeared in Takemitsu’s works: on the one hand, traditional Japanese music (November Steps, 1967, for biwa, shakuhachi and orchestra) in the form of the deliberate juxtaposition of Eastern and Western musical culture and, on the other hand, the musical representation of natural phenomena (ARCI for orchestra, 1963-1966). Representations of the art of Japanese gardens through the utilisation of symbolic musical metaphors are frequently encountered in his compositions (A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden for orchestra, 1977). Although Takemitsu’s artistically most ambitious works are focused on the genres orchestral and chamber music, the composer also displays great interest in popular music including jazz, pop and French chansons. He composed around a hundred film scores (Dodes’ka-Den, 1996). His 12 Songs for Guitar (1977), containing passages with arrangements of world-famous pop classics (including songs by the Beatles), demonstrate Takemitsu’s affinity with the broader musical tastes generated by the hyper-cultural influences of a media-dominated world. Takemitsu was the recipient of numerous awards and prizes including the Prix Italia, first prize at the Festival of Contemporary Music in Karuisawa (both in 1958), the German Consulate prize at the Tokyo Contemporary Music Festival (1960 and 1961), the major prize at the Japanese Art Festival (1966), the Otaka Prize (1976 and 1981) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award (for the film “Ran”, 1987), the UNESCO-IMC Music Prize (1991), the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition (1994) and the Glenn Gould Prize (1996). Takemitsu was composer-in-residence at the Canberra Festival of Musica Viva in Australia (1960), at the London Music Digest (1973) and the Evenings for New Music at the State University of New York in Buffalo (1977). In 1979, he was appointed as an honorary member of the Academy of Arts in the German Democratic Republic, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1984, a member of the Ordre des arts et des letters in 1985 and in 1994 as a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. Rain Tree by Toru Takemitsu (1981) Rain Tree was written in 1981 and is one of a number of works Takamitsu wrote that were inspired by the rain tree. “It is called the ‘rain tree’ because it seems to make it rain. Whenever it rains at night, throughout the following morning the tree makes drops fall from all its richly growing leaves. While the other trees quickly dry out after the rain, the Rain Tree, because its leaves, no bigger than fingertips, grow so closely together, can store up raindrops in its leaves. Truly an ingenious tree!” Quoted from “atama no ii Ame no Ki” (The Ingenious Rain Tree) by Kenzaburo Oé 
Minako Tokuyama graduated from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music and the Universitaet der Kuenste Berlin. She studied composing under Tomojiro Ikenouchi, Akio Yashiro, and Isang Yun. In 1992 she won the first prize in the 5th Prix de Fukui de Musique Harpe and she was invited as one of the judges to the same contest in 1995.In 1995 with her piece Memento Mori for Chamber Orchestra for Ballet, she won the first prize in the Vienna International Composition Competition under supervision of Claudio Abbado.The winning work was premiered at the Wien Modern Festival in 1996 and later performed by the Wiener Staatsopernballett in November 1997 (6 concerts). In 2003 and 2004, she was a judge in the Japan Music Competition. In 2006 she was selected as a commissioned composer of the 6th Hamamatsu International Piano Competition.
Her representative works include Musica Nara, the required piece of the same competition in 2006 and Oriental Garden, the required piece of the Japan Harp Competition in 2017. Her dignified and graceful style is loved by many performers including Naoko Yoshino and Kotaro Fukuma, and has been performed repeatedly. The Jo-no--mai~Inspired by Shoen Uemura~For PIano composed in 2018 was evaluated as "silk-like delicate music" by the French newspaper Le Monde. In Musica Nara, Minako Tokuyama conjures Japan's ancient capital of Nara with her palette of cultural motifs that bridge the past and present. 
Described as “alluringly exotic” (The New York Times), and “hauntingly attractive” (San Francisco Chronicle), the music of Bun-Ching Lam has been performed worldwide by such ensembles as the Macao Orchestra, American Composer’s Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, The Vienna Radio Orchestra, Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the Albany Symphony. Born in Macao, Lam has served as the composer-in-residence of the Macao Orchestra from 2008-2016. She began her piano study in her native city, then further pursued her music education in Hong Kong and the United States. She holds a B.A. degree in Piano Performance from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California at San Diego. She has taught at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and served as Visiting Professor at the Yale University School of Music and at Bennington College.
She has been recognized by numerous awards including a Rome Prize, the highest Award at the Shanghai International Composers’ Competition, two NEA grants, fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has received commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Macau Orchestra, Chamber Music America, CrossSound Festival, Bang On a Can Festival, Sequitur, Continuum, Ursula Oppens and the Arditti String Quartet. She also served as the Music Alive! Composer-in-Residence with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra. Bun-Ching Lam’s work has been recorded on Mutable Music, CRI, Tzadik, Nimbus, and Koch International. She now divides her time between Paris and New York. ...Like Water by Bun-Ching Lam Written for the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio, ….Like Water was created for a dance entitled "Jo Sui", choreographed by June Watanabe. The work consists of sixteen short movements inspired by the nature of water, with each movement written in more or less a single day. 
Yoko Ono (Japanese, b.1933) is a musician, composer, and multimedia artist, most active in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. After Ono''s family moved from Tokyo to Scarsdale, NY in the early 1950s, she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1955, she eloped with the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi and moved to Manhattan, where she joined circles and communities of avant-garde artists.
In the 1960s, Ono became one of the original members of the artist group Fluxus. She hosted performance pieces for fellow artists at her downtown apartment, and had solo performances and exhibitions of her own work at the Carnegie Recital Hall and the AG Gallery. In 1962, Ono returned to Tokyo, where she presented solo shows and concerts at the Sogetsu Art Center. She married American art promoter Tony Cox in 1963. In 1964, Ono debuted Cut Piece, a performance in which she invited audience members to join her onstage and to cut off her clothing piece by piece. The performance is considered an early example of the burgeoning Feminist Art movement, and often described as one of Ono's most significant works. Many of Ono's most notable works are Conceptual and require the participation of viewers or audience members. In 1966, Ono moved to London, where she met John Lennon at an exhibition of her work at the Indica Gallery. Their meeting marked the start of what would become a famous relationship, one that was both personal and professional due to their many artistic collaborations. Ono and Lennon were perhaps best known for their performance pieces, such as Bed-Ins (1969). When they invited the press into their honeymoon suite in March of 1969, they used the opportunity to discuss world peace while wearing their pajamas. The couple continued to work together on a variety of artistic projects until Lennon's death in 1980. Ono continues to exhibit her work today; her art has been displayed in many institutions, including the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Japan Society in New York. Grapefruit is an artist's book written by Yoko Ono, originally published in 1964. It has become famous as an early example of conceptual art, containing a series of "event scores" that replace the physical work of art – the traditional stock-in-trade of artists – with instructions that an individual may, or may not, wish to enact. Our Early Music Festival performance will feature a performance by festival performers and audience of Question, a continual dialogue in any number of languages. Program
Sunday, April 21 1:00pm Sweet Whisper of a Flower/Come Sunday June 4, 1989/ When the Snake Celebrates the Golden Dance (1998) by Jon Jang Music for Electric Metronomes (1995) by Bun-Ching Lam Nori II (2008) by Jin Hi Kim 
Composer Jon Jang (born 1954) became the first American born Chinese to compose a symphonic work that honors Chinese American history. Commissioned by the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra and Oakland East Bay Symphony, Jon Jang composed The Chinese American Symphony which pays tribute to the Chinese immigrant laborers who built the first transcontinental railroad in United States.
For nearly four decades, composer and pianist Jon Jang give a musical voice to a history that has been silent. A majority of his works represents a chronology of Chinese American history in San Francisco such as Island: The Immigrant Suite No. 2 for the Kronos Quartet. Pianist/composer Jon Jang has collaborated and recorded with Max Roach, James Newton and David Murray. Jang’s ensembles have toured at major concert halls and music festivals in Europe, China, Canada, United States and South Africa, four months after the election to end apartheid in April 1994. Jang’s latest recording, The Pledge of Black Asian Allegiance, pays tribute to Malcolm X, Yuri Kochiyama and to Black Lives Matter. In 1987 in San Francisco, Jon Jang and saxophonist Francis Wong co-founded Asian Improv aRts where their mission statement is to support new directions in music by Asian Americans. Sweet Whisper of a Flower is a romantic impressionist work inspired by Wayne Shorter. The beautiful lyricism is based on the development of Chinese folk music in a modern context. Because Chinese folk music is rhythmically simple, I composed a wind melody which has Chinese folk melodic characteristics placed is asymmetrical phrasing as if performed by Wayne Shorter. Similar to Cantonese Opera interludes, the middle section of the work abruptly changes into a funk section but with the instruments performing a Cantonese melodic figure as the function of the bass. Because both of these two works share the same melody, there is a motivic relationship which links them together.
Inspired by the Duke Ellington work, Come Sunday, June 4 1989 is written in remembrance of those lost in the Tiananmen Square massacre. When the Snake Celebrates the Golden Dance is based on a popular Chinese celebration work which was recontextualized in 1934 by Nie Er, China’s most famous composer, and became the Golden Snake Dance. I transform the traditional celebratory music by translocating the Chinese melodies in counterpoint to funk bass figures from Black American music. This work expresses somewhere between the transfunk of James Brown, George Clinton, and Chinese celebratory music. —Jon Jang 
Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933-2022) studied composition under Kishio Hirao, Tomojiro Ikenouchi, and John Cage. He studied piano under Chieko Hara and Beveridge Webster.
He took first place in the composition division of the 18th (1949) and 20th (1951) Mainichi Music Competition (presently the Music Competition of Japan). While studying at the Julliard School of Music in New York from 1954 to 1957, he was awarded the Elizabeth A. Coolidge Prize (1955), the Serge Koussevitzky Prize (1956), and the Alexander Gretchaninov Prize (1957). Invited by the Festival of Institute of Twentieth Century Music he returned to Japan in 1961 and held concerts and introductions both to his own music and the new music of Japan, Europe and the United States, stimulating activitity in a variety of fields. From 1966 to 67, engaged by the Rockefeller Foundation, he returned to the U. S. and held recitals of his works all over the country. In 1976 he was engaged by Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) as Composer-in-Residence for the city of Berlin, where he resided for six months. At music festivals all over Europe he held concerts to introduce his own works or the works of other Japanese composers. He visited Europe repeatedly after that, receiving commissions from the European Pro Musica Nova Festival (1976), Metamusik Festival (1978), Cologne Festival of Contemporary Music (1978, 1981), Holland Festival (1979), Berliner Festwochen (1981), etc. In 1981 he received the 30th Otaka Prize for Piano Concerto No. 1 “Reminiscence of Spaces”. In 1984 he was awarded Grand Prix of the Nakajima Prize for his activities as a composer, performer and producer, and his second Otaka Prize, this time for Violin Concerto Circulating Scenery. This violin concerto was given its American premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York in February of the same year. In June 1984, his numerous works were performed at Seibu Theatre as Theme Composer for the contemporary music festival “Music Today.” Also in June as part of the Japan France Culture Summit, with Toru Takemitsu he held a concert of orchestral works at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris at the request of L’orchestre National de France. In 2002 he received the 33rd Suntory Music Prize. In 2004 he assumed the post of Composer-in-Residence at the Pacific Music Festival (PMF). In 2006 he premiered his third opera White Nights. In 1999 he was awarded the Medal with Purple Ribbon, and again in 2005 the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, by the Japanese Government. He has been selected as one of the Persons in Cultural Merit since 2008. Music for Electric Metronomes is an aleatoric composition written in 1960 by Japanese composer for any number of performers between three and eight. The piece involves the manipulation of electric metronimces, followed by various unspecified sounds and actions. It is a very theatrical piece, and reflects Ichiyanagi's affiliation with the Fluxus movement, an experimental art movement from the sixties. The only true scored "instrument" is an electric metronome for each individual player,though the varying sounds and/or actions may involve many different instruments and objects at the discretion of the performer. Because the graphic notation of the score —a series of dashes, lines, and numbers in an erratic pattern of connected paths—leaves room for personal interpretation and expression, each performance is unique, and almost certainly cannot be reproduced.
Jin Hi Kim, innovative komungo virtuoso, Guggenheim Fellow composer, and United States Artist Fellow, has performed as a soloist in her own compositions at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Freer Gallery of Art, Asia Society, Metropolitan Museum of Art and around the world. The New York Times wrote, “…virtuoso, Jin Hi Kim promises thoughtful, shimmering East-West amalgams in combinations that are both new and unlikely to be repeated.”
In 2021 GRAMMY.com wrote "A Musical Philosopher And Radiator Of Electricity:Jin Hi Kim." She received the New England Foundation for the Arts' Rebecca Blunk Fund Award to create her A Ritual for Covid-19 in memory of the deceased worldwide during the pandemic. This performance is in the spirit of healing of the apocalyptic years of 2020-21. She is known as a pioneer for introducing komungo (geomungo) into the American contemporary music scene and for extensive solo performances on the world’s only electric komungo with live interactive computer programs in her large-scale multimedia performance pieces such as Ghost Komungobot, Digital Buddha, and Touching The Moons. The Washington Post wrote, "Her unique vision blends science fiction images, state-of-the-art technology, ancient mythology and timeless music and dance traditions. No other artist is doing work quite like this, and she does it with superb style." Kim’s 'Living Tones' compositions have been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, American Composers Orchestra, Festival Nieuwe Muziek for Xenakis Ensemble (The Netherlands), Tan Dun's New Generation East program for Chamber Music Society for the Lincoln Center, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Meet The Composer US Commission, National Endowment for the Arts and many others. The New York Times wrote, "A gorgeously tactile piece that moved easily between an earthy folksiness and meditative refinement." Kim won the Wolff Ebermann Prize at the International Theater Institute (Germany), New England Foundation for the Art' Rebecca Blunk Fund Award, and received Artist Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, which was created by John Cage and Jasper Johns. She received the artist residence fellowships for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy, Asian Cultural Council to Japan and Indonesia, Freeman Artist-In-Residence at Cornell University, Composer-to-Composer Residency with John Cage and international composers in Telluride Institute, Fulbright Specialist Program to Vietnam, Composers Now Creative Residencies at the Pocantico Center of Rockefeller Brothers Fund, McKnight Visiting Composer with the American Composers Forum, and Music Alive Composer in Residency with New Haven Symphony. Kim’s autobiography Komungo Tango, a 25 years journey of creative collaborations with master musicians in the USA and around the world, was published in Seoul, Korea. A retrospective interview about Kim's major works was recorded and archived in Oral History of American Music at Yale University Library. Interview about her electric komungo was featured on MBC-TV in conjunction with Korean Traditional Craft Exhibition 2007 at United Nation. In 2001 Korean National Broadcasting System (KBS-TV) produced an hour documentary film on Kim's musical contribution. Read more NORI II (2008) by Jin Hi Kim
The word NORI means fun play in Korean and originated in the traditional “farmer’s percussion band”‚ in the 3rd century. This music was performed when country folks celebrated the lunar calendar festival and performed at the village Shamanistic ritual. During the Shaman ritual (kut), the farmer’s percussion group entertained the crowds with a parade and dance with spinning hats while they were playing the band at outdoor events. In contemporary times, this tradition has evolved by using the word samulnori. In 1978, four virtuoso Korean percussionists created a small ensemble for janggu (hour glass shaped drum), buk (barrel drum), jing (gong) and kwenggari (small gong), and they started to perform this music in a sitting position on the floor for indoor concert events. Thus moving it from the original outdoors to the formal concert stage performed by professional. Traditionally the music is for exorcism with the aesthetic of duality of tension and release between tempo; and contrasting timbres of yin and yang between skin and metal instruments of the ensemble. The series of rhythmic cycles are evolving with continuous variations that have the alternative goal to create both swing and mesmerizing energy throughout the piece. NORI II is an attempt to realize the same aesthetic for Western instruments. In this piece the time sense is different. The rhythmic cycles reflect ever-repeating cycles of our life. They eventually move towards independent rhythmic cycles, reflecting the behavior of energy inside empty space forcing planets and stars further away from each other and into space. NORI II is a reimagining of NORI I, a work written for Zeitgeist for two percussion, keyboard, and clarinet. —Jin Hi Kim |
