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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11340/
Please join us on Thursday, September 28, 2006 from 8-10pm at Slought Foundation for an evening of new and experimental music and the second event of the Sound Field 2006 festival. This concert will feature Ensemble Noamnesia with special guests Chao-Ming Tung (a composer and guzheng player from Taiwan), Wu Wei (a sheng player from China), and Hong Wang (a huqin player and the director of Melody of China in San Francisco), and
is made possible in part through a generous grant from the Argosy Foundation.
The program will feature new compositions for Chinese and western instruments by Chao-Ming Tung, Gene Coleman, and Yuji Takahashi, incorporating experimental improvised music as well as traditional Chinese music. Please note that the guzheng is a large zither-like instrument from China (similar to a Koto), the sheng is a bamboo mouth organ from China, and the huqin is a two string violin from China. Each of these instruments have been used for thousands of years in Chinese music; this program will explore the ways in which these instruments have traditionaly been used, as well as new possibilities for contemporary practice by way of these extraordinary musicians. Whether this is your first visit to a Sound Field @ Slought event, or you have attended events in this series in the past, please consider bringing a friend to this performance and introducing yourself to us.
Chao-Ming Tung is a Taiwanese-born composer and gu-zheng player (Chinese zither) who is based in Cologne, Germany. His music encompasses stage, instrumental, vocal, and electro-acoustic works, as well as multimedia-performances with visual arts and dance. Since 2000 he has gradually incorporated Chinese instruments into his music, and improvises with gu-zheng and live electronics in live concerts and performances. In 1988 he began composition studies with Chien Nan-Chang in the Chinese-Culture-University Taipei. He continued his training from 1990 -1997 at the Musikhochschule Köln Germany with Johannes Fritsch and Mauricio Kagel, and later at the Folkwang-Hochschule Essen with Nicolaus A. Huber, where he graduated with distinction. Since 1999 he has worked as a freelance composer and musician, and facilitates East-West cultural exchanges. Tung’s work has been presented in concerts of numerous festivals throughout Europe, Asia, and the USA. He has collaborated with choreographers, dancers, painters, musicians, ensembles, sound-, media- and video artists, e.g. Annegret Heiln, René Pieters, Bernhard Gal, Klang Forum Wien, Ensemble Ictus, Ensemble Modern, ensemble 2e2m, Ensemble On-Line Vienna, ensemble DEDALO, and China Found Music Workshop Taipei.
He was awarded the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Scholarship for Composers from the City of Cologne in 1999, and the Scholarship of National Culture and Arts Foundation Taiwan in 2001.
Wu Wei was born in the Southeast-China Province of Jiangsu, and started to learn the Chinese violin Erhu at the age of five. At 15 he begins his study of the mouth-organ Sheng at the Art-Academy of Nanjing. From 1989 to 1993 he graduated as master-student of this instrument at the internationally renowned Music-Conservatory of Shanghai. Until then he had won the most prestigious national and international competitions for traditional Chinese music. Subsequent concert-tours through China, Japan, USA and Europe familiarized Wu Wei with non-Chinese music-traditions; his first projects with European musicians in Shanghai acquainted him with the practice of Jazz and New Music, for instance. Wu Wei originates from the Chinese classical music, with a strong interest in modern and improvised music, Jazz-influenced and new and improvised music, as well as minimalism. Wei has developed a new sound-language for Chinese instruments and contemporary new music by experimenting with his three-thousand-year-old Chinese instrument. Since 1993 Wei has appeared as a Soloist with different ensembles and orchestras, in countless concerts and recitals and in festivals throughout Germany and internationally. Wu Wei has performed as a guest-soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Kent Nagano and the New Philharmony Westfalen under GMD Samuel Bächli; the Atlas Ensemble Holland, the Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam, the Ensemble "Musica Viva" Dresden; the Ensemble MUSICA TEMPORALE Dresden,the Ensemble On_line Wien; and the Ensemble N_Er. From 1998 to 2003 he participated in more than 30 premieres of contemporary compositions including John Cage, Enjott Schneider, Helmut Zapf, Jörg Widmann, Chico Mello, Gunter Baby Sommer, Fabio Nieder, Jörg Herchet, Daniel Ott, Xiao Yongchen, Jörg Herchet, Wolfgang Heisig, Volk Staub, and Christian Utz.
Hong Wang is a multi-instrumentalist who specializes in many Chinese traditional and western instruments. Wang is a graduate of Nanjing Normal University's Music Department where he studied with the celebrated erhu (Chinese fiddle) master Rui Zhang, and the esteemed Professor Xiaojie Lu, master player of the Huqin (Chinese 2-stringed instruments). He is a member of the Chinese National Orchestra Society, the Chinese Musicians Association, Jiangsu Branch, and Former Board Director of the Chinese Wind Instruments Society, Jiangsu Branch. At present, he is also the producer of Melody of China's annual concert and The Festival of Experimental Music in San Francisco. A dedicated researcher in his specialized field, Wang has made numerous recordings of Chinese folk music, often traveling to remote villages to document his country's rich heritage of ancient regional music. His work has been published internationally and he is known to ethnomusicologists worldwide as a contributing correspondent for CHIME Newsletter published by the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research. In 1985, under the auspices of the Chinese government, Mr. Wang was appointed Chief Music Editor to compile an Anthology of Chinese QuYi (narrative style music), Jiangsu Province Volume. This accomplishment earned him the distinction of being the youngest authority in the field of regional folk music. Since 2000, he has produced many new music concerts including "Silk Road Suite" and "Si Jin Suite" by Yuanlin Chen, "Thundering Across the Sky," a commissioned work by Yuanlin Chen, and "A Dialogue with Dancing Lions," a commissioned work by Hang Situ combined with the Loong Mah Lion Dance Group. Among his many performances and appearences, he performed the Violin and Erhu Double Concerto (Music by Gang Situ) with members of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra in 1995, and also played the sheng (mouth organ) in a production of Meredith Monk's Opera, "Atlas", accompanied by the Pacific Mozart Ensemble. In June 1996, he peformed as a Chinese multi-instrumentalist and composer of Melody of China to the Tanz & FolkFest Rudolstadt (Folk Dance and Music Festival) in Germany, a performance which was broadcast on Deutschland Radio, MDR Television Station, and Berlin Classical Music Radio Station. In June 2000, he was invited to perform at the "Concert in the Wildstage" by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in Berlin, Germany.
Ensemble Noamnesia was founded in Chicago in 1987 and frequently performs new and experimental music. In 1997, the group initiated a series of projects with an international orientation, including a residency with German composer Helmut Lachenmann, which included four concerts of his music in collaboration with the Goethe Institute, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Subsequent projects included performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art with the Beppie Blankerkt Dance Company and the music of Charles Ives, a concert of music by Gerhard Staebler and Kunsu Shim, and two concerts of music by George Crumb. More recently, featured composers have included Luc Ferrari and Otomo Yoshihide, as well as Mathias Spahlinger, Burkhard Stangl, Vinko Globokar, Nic Collins, Malcolm Goldstein, Amnon Wolman, Karlheinz Essl, Jennifer Walshe, Salvatore Sciarrino, Chao-Ming Tung, Michael Maierhof, Yuji Takahashi, and many others. Gene Coleman is the artistic director of Ensemble Noamnesia. This concert will feature Gene Coleman (bass clarinet), Carmel Raz (violin/viola), Marina Peterson (cello), and Evan Lipson (bass) as Ensemble Noamnesia.
This program is made possible in part through the generous sponsorship or support of the Argosy Foundation and Sound Field NFP.
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