KRONOS FESTIVAL 2025 COMPOSER BIOS
Peni Candra Rini
Peni Candra Rini is the daughter of a master puppeteer from East Java Indonesia, and one of few female contemporary composers, songwriters, poets, and vocalists who performs sinden, a soloist-female style of gamelan singing. Strongly committed to preserving and sharing the musical traditions of her country, Candra Rini has created many musical compositions for vocals, gamelan, and karawitan, and has collaborated with various artists worldwide, including Katsura Kan, Noriko Omura, Aki Bando, Kiyoko Yamamoto (JP), Found Sound Nation New York, Elena Moon Park (USA), Ali Tekbas (Turkey), Mehdi Nassouli (Morocco), Asma Ghanem (Palestine), Rodrigo Parejo (Spain), among many others.
Candra Rini has collaborated with various gamelan groups from all over the world, and has performed at major festivals including Mascot SIPA Solo International Performing Arts 2016, TEDx Ubud 2019, Big Ears Festival 2019, Mapping Melbourne 2018 Multicultural Art Festival, International Gamelan Festival 2018 Surakarta, Indonesian Tong-Festival Festival 2018 in The Hague, Holland Festival 2017, WOMADelaide festival 2014 in Adelaide, Spoleto Dei Duo Mondi Festival 2013, and Lincoln Center White Light Festival 2011. Her recorded albums include Ayom (2019), Timur (2018), Agni (2017), MahabharataKurusetra War (2016), Daughter of the Ocean (2016), Bhumi (2015), Sekar (2012), and Bramara (2010).
In 2012, Candra Rini completed an artist residency at the California Art Institute with funding from the Asian Cultural Council. During that time, she appeared as a guest artist at eight American universities and participated in master classes with vocal master Meredith Monk. In addition to this extensive work as a performer, Candra Rini is also a lecturer in the Karawitan Department, an Aga Khan Laureate, and a former Fulbright Scholar. In 2021, she earned a doctorate in Musical Arts from the Indonesian Art Institute (ISI) in Surakarta.
Hamza El Din
Hamza El Din was born in Nubia, along the Nile River near the southern Egyptian border (Aswan). He grew up in a culture rich in melodious and rhythmic music. While studying engineering in Cairo, he took up the oud, the precursor of the lute and a principal instrument of Arabic classical music. Later, while holding down full-time jobs, he began studying music formally at the Conservatory of Music in Cairo. During this time and during subsequent study at the Academy of St. Cecilia in Rome, his work began to combine elements of Nubian and Egyptian traditional music within Western formal structures.
In 1964, Hamza made his first recording, Music of Nubia, on Vanguard Recordings. In the same year, he embarked on his first concert tour of the United States. Since then, he has been traveling, performing and teaching music in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia
and Australia. In 1981, he went to Japan to make a comparative study of biwa (Japanese lute) and oud, funded by a grant from the Japan Foundation. Impressed with the country and its people, he performed there frequently. Hamza now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues to teach, record and perform his music around the world.
Performing brilliantly on the oud and the tar (the ancient single-skinned frame drum of the upper Nile), along with his gentle voice and original compositions, Hamza combines the subtleties of Arabic music with the indigenous music of his native Nubia. In his masterful hands the oud has become a virtuoso instrument as well as an accompaniment to his singing. He has single-handedly forged a new music, essentially a Nubian/Arabic fusion but one in line with both traditions and informed by Western conservatory training. His music has captured the interest of millions of listeners from the Middle East, Europe, Japan and North America.
First discovered by the Western audiences through his performance at the Newport Folk Festival and Vanguard recordings in 1964, his 1970 Nonesuch recording, Escalay: The Water Wheel is legendary among musicians and connoisseurs. His best known recording in the United States is Eclipse, produced and engineered by Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart. Hamza's music has also appeared in movie soundtracks such as the Francis Ford Coppola film, The Black Stallion, You Are What You Eat , and the Japanese film, The Robinson's Garden. His latest releases (on Japanese labels) include: Nubiana Suite, Live in Tokyo, King recording Songs of the Nile, J. V. C. recording Muwashshah, JVC recording and re-release of Journey, companion to his best-selling autobiography of the same title. During 1993, he scored and performed in The Persians, directed by Peter Sellers, which played at the Salzburg and Edinburgh Festivals, the Los Angeles Music Center, MC93/Bobigny (Paris) and Hebbel Theatre (Berlin). His recent concerts and festival performances included Tokyo, Vienna, Brussels, Cairo, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Barcelona and Mexico.
inti figgis-vizueta
New York–based composer inti figgis-vizueta braids a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City (DC)—with direct Andean & Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land. “Her music feels sprouted between structures, liberated from certainty and wrought from a language we’d do well to learn” writes The Washington Post . inti's work explores the transformative power of group improvisation and play, working to reconcile historical aesthetics and experimental practices with trans & Indigenous futures. Recent highlights include the Carnegie Hall premiere of her string quartet concerto, Seven Sides of Fire, written for the Attacca Quartet and American Composers Orchestra, conducted by Mei-Ann Chen; performances of Coradh (bending) by the Spoleto Festival, PODIUM Festival, and Oregon Symphony; and the REDCAT premiere of her evening-length show Music for Transitions, created in collaboration with two-time Grammy Award-winning cellist Andrew Yee, praised as “thrilling” and “revolutionary” by I Care If You Listen. Upcoming projects include a new Carnegie Hall-commissioned work for Ensemble Connect, continued development of Earths to Come for vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and
a new piano concerto for Conrad Tao and the Cincinnati Symphony, conducted by Matthias Pintscher.
Jacob Garchik
Jacob Garchik, multi-instrumentalist and composer, was born in San Francisco and has lived in New York since 1994. At home in a wide variety of styles and musical roles, he is a vital part of the Downtown and Brooklyn scene, playing trombone in groups ranging from jazz to contemporary classical to Balkan brass bands. He has released 5 albums as a leader including “The Heavens: the Atheist Gospel Trombone Album”. He co-leads Brooklyn’s premiere Mexican brass band, Banda de los Muertos.
Since 2006 Jacob has contributed over 100 arrangements and transcriptions for Kronos Quartet of music from all over the world. His arrangements were featured on “Floodplain” (2009), “Rainbow” (2010), “A Thousand Thoughts” (2014), “Folk Songs” (2017), “Ladilikan” (2017), “Landfall” (2018), “Placeless” (2019) and "Long Time Passing" (2020).
In 2017 he composed the score for “The Green Fog” (2017), a found-footage remake of Vertigo, directed by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, which Kronos performed live at the SF Film Festival premiere. He has created arrangements for Anne Sofie von Otter, Angelique Kidjo, Laurie Anderson, Rhiannon Giddens, kd lang, Jolie Holland, Natalie Merchant, Tanya Tagaq, and Alim Qasimov. He teaches “Arranging Ensemble” at Mannes College.
As a trombonist Jacob has worked with many luminaries of jazz and the avant-garde, including Henry Threadgill, Steve Swallow, Lee Konitz, Laurie Anderson, Anthony Braxton, and George Lewis. He has also played in ensembles led by emerging artists Mary Halvorson, Dafnis Prieto, Ethan Iverson, Darcy James Argue, Miguel Zenon, and Steve Lehman. In 2018 he won the “Rising Star – Trombone” category in the Downbeat Jazz Critic’s Poll.
Jacob also plays accordion, tenor horn, and tuba.
Hildur Guðnadóttir
Academy Award winning Hildur Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic composer, cello player, and singer who has been manifesting herself at the forefront of experimental pop and contemporary music. In her solo works she draws out a broad spectrum of sounds from her instrument, ranging from intimate simplicity to huge soundscapes. Her work for Film and Television includes “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”, “Mary Magdalene”, “Tom of Finland”, “Journey’s End” and 20 episodes of the Icelandic TV series “Trapped” (streaming on Amazon Prime).
In addition, her body of work includes scores for films such “Joker” starring Joaquin Phoenix,for which she won a Golden Globe award for Best Original Score and an Academy Award. Alongside the critically acclaimed HBO series “Chernobyl”,for which she received a Primetime Emmy award and a Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media.
“The HBO series stunning success owes much to Guðnadóttir’s evocative score, as discomfiting as the tragic history or malevolence on screen.” – Sydney Morning Herald
Gudnadóttir began playing cello as a child, entered the Reykjavík Music Academy and then moved on to musical studies/composition and new media at the Iceland Academy of the Arts and Universität der Künste Berlin.
Hildur has released four critically acclaimed solo albums: Mount A (2006), Without Sinking (2009), Leyfðu Ljósinu (2012) and Saman (2014). Her records have been nominated a number of times for the Icelandic Music Awards. Hildur’s albums are all released on Touch.
She has composed music for theatre, dance performances and films. The Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, Icelandic National Theatre, Tate Modern, The British Film Institute, The Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm and Gothenburg National Theatre are amongst the institutions that have commissioned new works by Hildur. She was nominated for the Nordic Music Council Prize as composer of the year 2014.
Among others Hildur has performed live and recorded music with Skúli Sverrisson, Jóhann Jóhannsson, múm, Sunn O))), Pan Sonic, Hauschka, Wildbirds & Peacedrums, Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Sylvian, The Knife, Fever Ray and Throbbing Gristle.
In 2018 Hildur was nominated for a Discovery of the Year Award at the World Soundtrack Academy in Gent and received several prestigious awards, including the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Best Score (“Mary Magdalene”) and Best Score at the Beijing International Film Festival for “Journey’s End”.
Hildur lives in Berlin, Germany.
Mary Kouyoumdjian
MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN is a composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. As a first generation ArmenianAmerican and having come from a family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, she uses a sonic palette that draws on her heritage, interest in music as documentary, and background in experimental composition to progressively blend the old with the new. A strong believer in freedom of speech and the arts as an amplifier of expression, her compositional work often integrates recorded testimonies with resilient
individuals and field recordings of place to invite empathy by humanizing complex experiences around social and political conflict.
A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects/OPERA America, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Roomful of Teeth among others. Her work has been featured internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, Prototype Festival, Cabrillo Festival, Big Ears Festival, Cal Performances, Tribeca Film Festival, and PBS. Upcoming projects include the March 2025 release of her portrait album WITNESS with the Kronos Quartet and a performance of her Pulitzer-nominated music-documentary, Paper Pianos, in collaboration with Alarm Will Sound at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in May 2025.
Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A. and M.A. in Composition at Columbia University, an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New York University, and a B.A. in Composition from UC San Diego. She is a cofounder of the annual new music conference New Music Gathering, is on faculty at The New School and the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and is based in Brooklyn, NY. www.marykouyoumdjian.com
Nicole Lizée
Called a “brilliant musical scientist” and lauded for “creating a stir with listeners for her breathless imagination and ability to capture Gen-X and beyond generation”, Montreal based composer Nicole Lizée creates new music from an eclectic mix of influences including the earliest MTV videos, turntablism, rave culture, Hitchcock, Kubrick, 1960s psychedelia and 1960s modernism. She is fascinated by the glitches made by outmoded and well-worn technology and captures these glitches, notates them and integrates them into live performance.
Lizée’s compositions range from works for orchestra and solo turntablist featuring DJ techniques fully notated and integrated into a concert music setting, to other unorthodox instrument combinations that include the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophones, Simon™, and karaoke tapes. In the broad scope of her evolving oeuvre she explores such themes as malfunction, reviving the obsolete, and the harnessing of imperfection and glitch to create a new kind of precision.
In 2001 Lizée received a Master of Music degree from McGill University. After a decade and a half of composition, her commission list of over 40 works is varied and distinguished (the Kronos Quartet, BBC Proms, l’Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, CBC, RadioCanada, the Kaufman Center, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, So Percussion, Eve Egoyan, Gryphon Trio, MATA Festival, TorQ Percussion, Fondation Arte Musica/Musée des
beaux-arts de Montréal, ECM+, Continuum, Soundstreams, SMCQ, Arraymusic, KitchenerWaterloo Symphony). Her music has been performed worldwide in renowned venues including Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall, Muziekgebouw and Cité de la Musique (Paris) –and in festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield, Bang On a Can, All Tomorrow’s Parties, X Avant, Luminato, C3 (Berlin), Ecstatic (NYC), Casalmaggiore (Italy), and Dark Music Days (Iceland).
Lizée was recently awarded the prestigious 2013 Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. She is a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow (New York City/Italy). This Will Not Be Televised, her seminal piece for chamber ensemble and turntables, was selected for the 2008 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers’ Top 10 Works. Her work for piano and notated glitch, Hitchcock Études, was chosen by the International Society for Contemporary Music to be featured at the 2014 World Music Days in Wroclaw, Poland. Additional awards and nominations include a Prix Opus (2013), two Prix collégien de musique contemporaine, (2012, 2013) and the 2002 Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize for achievements in composition.
Benedicte Maurseth
Benedicte Maurseth is a well-established and esteemed performer and composer on Norway’s music scene. She has studied with Hardanger fiddle master Knut Hamre for close to thirty years and is an alumna of the Ole Bull Academy. Maurseth has toured extensively as a soloist and in collaboration with others, both in Norway and internationally. She works closely with many of the leading artists across genres and artistic expressions such as Jon Fosse, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Rolf Lislevand, Mats Eilertsen, Berit Opheim, Merilyn Crispell, and more. Maurseth has written music for theater and film and other commissioned works for festivals and albums. The work Tidekverv, which was premiered in 2017, was awarded NOPA's music prize, and her song «Very Full», w hich was specially written for the TV series Loki (Marvel Studio), ranked high on the Billboard list.
Maurseth also received many prestigious artist grants from the Norwegian state for cultivating her tradition and creative work. She has recorded albums for Grappa Musikkforlag (Hubro & Heilo) and ECM Records, and has also published books, articles and essays. Her book To be nothing. Conversations with Knut Hamre, Hardanger Fiddle Master, was published at Terra Nova Press / MIT Press fall 2019. Her latest album Hárr was awarded «Best Nordic album of the year», and received the prestigious Nordic Music Prize for 2022. In 2022 she also released the book Systerspel (Fiddlesisters) about the history of female fiddle players in Norway from 1700 until today.
Laura Ortman
A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances,
and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an allNative American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast.
Ortman is the recipient of the 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-inResidence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Terry Riley
Terry Riley first came to prominence in 1964 when he subverted the world of tightly organized atonal composition then in fashion. With the groundbreaking In C—a work built upon steady pulse throughout; short, simple repeated melodic motives; and static harmonies Riley achieved an elegant and non-nostalgic return to tonality. In demonstrating the hypnotic allure of complex musical patterns made of basic means, he produced the seminal work of Minimalism.
Riley’s facility for complex pattern-making is the product of his virtuosity as a keyboard improviser. He quit formal composition following In C in order to concentrate on improvisation, and in the late 1960s and early ‘70s he became known for weaving dazzlingly intricate skeins of music from improvisations on organ and synthesizer. At this time, Riley also devoted himself to studying North Indian vocal techniques under the legendary Pandit Pran Nath, and a new element entered his music: long-limbed melody. From his work in Indian music, moreover, he became interested in the subtle distinctions of tuning that would be hard to achieve with a traditional classical ensemble.
Riley began notating music again in 1979 when both he and the Kronos Quartet were on the faculty at Mills College in Oakland. By collaborating with Kronos, he discovered that his
various musical passions could be integrated, not as pastiche, but as different sides of similar musical impulses that still maintained something of the oral performing traditions of India and jazz. Riley’s first quartets were inspired by his keyboard improvisations, but his knowledge of string quartets became more sophisticated through his work with Kronos, combining rigorous compositional ideas with a more performance-oriented approach.
This three-decade-long relationship has yielded more than two dozen works for string quartet, including a concerto for string quartet, The Sands, which was the Salzburg Festival’s first-ever new music commission; Sun Rings, a multimedia piece for choir, visuals, and space sounds, commissioned by NASA; and The Cusp of Magic, for string quartet and pipa. Kronos’ album Cadenza on the Night Plain, a collection of music by Riley, was selected by both Time and Newsweek as one of the 10 Best Classical Albums of the Year in 1988. The epic five-quartet cycle, Salome Dances for Peace, was selected as the #1 Classical Album of the Year by USA Today and was nominated for a Grammy in 1989.
Gabriella Smith
Composer Gabriella Smith grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area playing and writing music, hiking, backpacking, and volunteering on a songbird research project. Described as “the coolest, most exciting, most inventive new voice I’ve heard in ages” (Musical America) and an “outright sensation” (LA Times), Gabriella’s music comes from a love of play, exploring new sounds on instruments, building compelling musical arcs, and connecting listeners with the natural world in an invitation to find joy in climate action. Recent highlights include the premiere of her organ concerto, Breathing Forests , written for James McVinnie and LA Phil, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; performances of Tumblebird Contrails by San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen, both at home and on their European tour; and the release of her first full-length album, Lost Coast , recorded in Iceland with cellist Gabriel Cabezas, named one of NPR Music’s “26 Favorite Albums Of 2021 (So Far)” and a “Classical Album to Hear Right Now” by The New York Times. Gabriel and Gabriella have since debuted a (cello-violin-voice- electronics) duo version of Lost Coast at the Philharmonie de Paris, and in May 2023 Gabriel will premiere the cello concerto version of Lost Coast with LA Phil, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.
Kristine Tjøgersen
Kristine Tjøgersen (*1982 in Oslo, Norway)’s compositional practice is characterized by curiosity, imagination, humor and precision. Through her work, she creates unexpected auditory situations through playing with tradition. She has a special interest in the interplay between the visual and the auditory and how they affect each other.
Nature in motion and process is often reflected in her works, and collaboration with researchers and biologists is for her a source of new sound and scenic ideas that allows her to incorporate organic forms into the music.
As Tjøgersen puts it, “By giving nature a voice in the concert hall, I want the audience to get to know valuable forms of life, and to raise awareness of what can be lost if humans continue to change nature.”
She holds an MA in composition from Anton Bruckner Universität in Austria, where she studied with Carola Bauckholt, and an MA in clarinet from the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied with Hans Christian Bræin.
Her works have been performed by Ensemble Recherche, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, SWR and WDR Symphonieorchester, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as at festivals such as ECLAT, Ultraschall, Wien Modern, Tectonics, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, and Ultima.
Tjøgersen received the Ernst von Siemens Composer Prize in 2025. In 2024 she got the Edvard-prize for her orchestra work Pelagic Dreamscape. In 2023 she was the winner of Coup de Coeur des Jeunes Mélomanes from Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, and in 2022 she won the International Rostrum of Composers in Palermo, for her orchestra work Between Trees . In 2021, she was awarded “Work of the Year” from the Norwegia n Society of Composers for her Piano Concerto. In 2019–20, Tjøgersen was a fellow at Akademie der Künste in Berlin, and in 2020 she received Norway’s Arne Nordheim Composer Prize, as well as the Pauline Hall Prize for her orchestra piece Bioluminescence.
Zachary James Watkins
Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, Zachary received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Zachary has received commissions from The Empyrean Ensemble, Splinter Reeds, The Switch Ensemble, Density512, sfsound, The Living Earth Show, Kronos Quartet and the Seattle Chamber Players among others. His 2006 composition “Suite for String Quartet” was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition and has subsequently been performed at the Labs 25th Anniversary Celebration, the Labor Sonor Series at Kule in Berlin Germany and in Seattle Wa, as part of the 2nd Annual Town Hall New Music Marathon featuring violist Eyvind Kang. Zachary has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe and his band Black Spirituals opened for pioneering Minimal Metal band Earth during their 2015 European tour. In 2008, Zachary premiered a new multi-media work entitled “Country Western” as part of the Meridian Gallery's Composers in Performance Series that received grants from the The American Music Center and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An excerpt of this piece is published on a compilation album entitled ”The Harmonic Series‚” along side Pauline Oliveros, Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong Charles Curtis and Duane Pitre
among others. Zachary completed Documentado / Undocumentado a multimedia interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez and Felicia Rice. His sound art work entitled Third Floor::Designed Obsolescence, "spoke as a metaphor for the breakdown of the dream of technology and the myth of our society's permanence," review by Susan Noyes Platt in the Summer 05 issue of ARTLIES. Zachary releases music on the labels Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine (DE), ITCH (ZA), Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores. Zachary has been an artist-in-resident at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi the Headlands Center for The Arts and the Amant Foundation Siena, Italy.
Soo Yeon Lyuh
Soo Yeon Lyuh is a composer, improviser, and master of the haegeum, a two-stringed Korean bowed instrument. Lyuh’s work strikes a balance between originality and tradition, borrowing and recontextualizing familiar gestures from Korean music. Her soundscape follows a logic of texture, pacing, feeling, and unexpected turns.
Lyuh asks classically trained performers to approach their instruments from an unusual perspective, drawing out fresh sounds that, once understood, sound organic. These sounds are deceptively difficult to specify with notation. Instead, Lyuh records herself playing the haegeum and teaches her music to performers by ear. A “score” will be both a printed page, and a set of instructional videos. She asks performers and listeners alike to reimagine the sounds of a conventional Western ensemble.
Lyuh’s music addresses present social issues. “Tattoo” (2021) is about fear and release, and responds to her own experience of a random shooting incident in California. “See You On The Other Side” (2021) was composed in response to the growing death toll of the coronavirus. “Moment 2020” (2020) has been dedicated to artists who struggle to stay creative during the pandemic. Lyuh’s music searches for connection and empathy in tumultuous times.
As a performer, Lyuh possesses flawless technique and a full command of the haegeum’s traditional repertoire. For twelve years, she was a member of South Korea’s National Gugak Center, which traces its roots to the 7th Century Shilla Dynasty and is Korea’s foremost institution for the preservation of traditional music. Lyuh has endeavored to weave authentic styles into new musical domains, relocating in 2015 to the San Francisco Bay Area and drawing inspiration from its dynamic improvised music scene. In 2017, Lyuh was awarded a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to develop collaborations with Bay Area experimental musicians. She pushes herself not only to command a deep understanding of historical works, but also to negotiate challenging new ones.
Through the Bay Area music scene, Lyuh met David Harrington, violinist of the Kronos Quartet. Harrington invited her to include “Yessori” (2017) in the Kronos’ project Fifty for the Future, which over five years commissioned fifty string quartets from prominent and emerging composers around the globe.
“There was no question that she was a phenomenal instrumentalist,” says David Harrington. “The sounds she is able to create on the haegeum are wholly unique and open up a vast new realm of sonic possibilities to Western ears. Moreover, the breadth of her knowledge of Korean traditional music is an incredible resource for musicians and scholars alike.”
Lyuh’s interest in improvisational music draws on Korean traditions lost to generations of performers. Although playing by ear is essential in bringing Korean folk music to life, preserving traditional performance has taken precedence over expanding the music’s improvisational vocabulary. In this respect Lyuh has ventured in a decidedly experimental direction. She was featured on the record Mudang Rock (2018) with drummer Simon Barker, guitarist Henry Kaiser, bassist Bill Laswell, and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. In December 2017, she played with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith at the Create Festival in San Francisco. She also played on a free improvisation recording, Megasonic Chapel (Fractal Music, 2015), featuring Kaiser, percussionist William Winant, pianist Tania Chen, and cellist Danielle DeGruttola. Meanwhile, Lyuh honed her improvisational skills by working with cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and sitting in on courses of pianist Myra Melford and avant -garde icon Roscoe Mitchell.
In 2023, Lyuh has earned a M.F.A in composition at Princeton University and is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation. Previously, Lyuh earned her D.M.A. in Korean Traditional Music from Seoul National University. As a lecturer, she is sought after for her ability to impart valuable insight and intercultural understanding to those unfamiliar with Korean traditional music; her dissertation researched the changing role of haegeum in Korean orchestras beginning with early court traditions. As a visiting scholar at Mills College (20172018) and UC Berkeley (2015-2016), Lyuh taught established and emerging composers in the Bay Area about haegeum composition and techniques in order to create new repertoire for the instrument. Lyuh has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (2011-2012).
“I think that it will be impossible to conquer the haegeum in my lifetime,” says Lyuh. “That is because it becomes harder the more I play it. The instrument continues to reveal itself. It is full of untapped possibilities for improvisation and composition. I hope the nature of my music can make a bridge between cultures across times, and break down any walls.”