[Event postponed due to Covid-19.]
Online discussion between composers featured at this year’s festival, which will see a total of four world premieres and two Asian premieres, including music commissioned specifically for Cosmopolis. Participants include noted sound and installation artist Samson Young; Pulitzer-finalist Augusta Read Thomas; Princeton Composition Professor Juri Seo; joining HKUST’s composition faculty, Ilari Kaila and Timothy Page.
Bios
Multi-disciplinary artist Samson Young (b. 1979, Hong Kong) works in sound, performance, video, and installation. He graduated with a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University in 2013. He was Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s Artist Associate from 2008 to 2009. In 2017, he represented Hong Kong at the 57th Venice Biennale. Other solo projects include the De Appel, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh; SMART Museum, Chicago; Centre for Contemporary Chinese Art in Manchester; M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Ryosoku-in at Kenninji Temple, Kyoto; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; and Jameel Art Centre, Dubai, among others. Selected group exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Performa 19, New York; Biennale of Sydney; Shanghai Biennale; National Museum of Art, Osaka; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Ars Electronica, Linz; and documenta 14: documenta radio, among others. In 2020, he was awarded the inaugural Uli Sigg Prize.
One of the most widely performed living composers in America today, Augusta Read Thomas (“a true virtuoso composer” —The New York Times) has won the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was featured on a Grammy-winning CD by Chanticleer. In 2016, Thomas was named the Chicagoan of the Year. Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, Eschenbach, Salonen, Maazel, Ozawa, and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession. The American Academy of Arts and Letters described Thomas as “one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music."
Recent and upcoming commissions include those from the Santa Fe Opera in collaboration with the San Francisco Opera and other opera companies, PEAK Performances at Montclair State University and the Martha Graham Dance Company, the Cathedral Choral Society of Washington D.C., the Indianapolis Symphony, Tanglewood, the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Des Moines Symphony, Boston Symphony, Utah Symphony, Wigmore Hall in London, JACK quartet, Third Coast Percussion, Spektral Quartet, Chicago Philharmonic, Eugene Symphony, the Danish Chamber Players, Notre Dame University, Lorelei Vocal Ensemble, and the Fromm Foundation.
Thomas is a University Professor of Composition in Music and the College at the University of Chicago. Thomas was the longest-serving Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for conductors Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez (1997–2006). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Juri Seo (b. 1981) is a Korean-American composer and pianist based in New Jersey, where she works as Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University. She seeks to write music that encompasses extreme contrast through compositions that are unified and fluid, yet complex. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland House Residency Award, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, the Goethe Institut, and the Tanglewood Music Center. Her portrait albums Mostly Piano and Respiri were released by Innova Recordings. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied with Reynold Tharp, having also attended the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, and Yonsei University, Seoul. She has been a composition fellow at the Tanglewood, Bang on a Can, and SoundSCAPE festivals, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
Ilari Kaila is a Finnish-American composer and pianist whose music has been described with words such as “haunting”, “intriguing”, “engaging … soulful” (The New York Times), “nearly unbearable beauty… A modern masterpiece” (The WholeNote), “melodically euphoric” (Rondo Classic), “hypnotic… trancelike… fascinatingly colorful” (New York Music Daily), “I kept coming back to it… the music is so beautiful, and I want to experience it again and again” (Orchestergraben—5 Best New Music Albums of 2020), “magnificent and glistening” (Amfion), “powerfully resonating” (Helsingin Sanomat), “haunting” (The New Yorker), and “Kaila brings with him an exciting message of rebirth built upon classical foundations” (Percorsi Musicali—Best of 2020).
Most recently, Kaila has been featured at a MATA composer portrait concert in New York, and as the Composer-in-Residence of the Chelsea Music Festival in New York and Taipei. His music has been performed at the 2014 Metropolis Festival in Australia by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Olli Mustonen; the 2014 Banff Centre Summer Arts Festival in Canada; the 2014 Music at the Anthology (MATA) Festival in New York City; and the New York International Fringe Festival 2014; among others. Other artists and ensembles Kaila has worked with include the Escher String Quartet, Tanglewood New Fromm Players, Uusinta Ensemble, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Albany Symphony Orchestra, Kuopio Symphony Orchestra, Joensuu Symphony Orchestra, Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra, and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s chamber ensembles. An album of Kaila’s chamber music, recorded by the Aizuri Quartet and Adrienne Kim, was released on the Innova Recordings label in March 2020.
Chicago-born composer, musician, and performance artist Timothy Page creates works that revolve around play with style and context, body, physical materials, and space. Page holds degrees from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland, where he established himself as a composer and studied with Veli-Matti Puumala; and the University of Chicago, where he completed his PhD with mentors Augusta Read Thomas and Anthony Cheung. In 2019 he was appointed Lecturer in Music and Digital Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Page is a founder and co-director of Dayjob Collective – a Helsinki-based interdisciplinary ensemble investigating meeting points between contemporary music and performance art. His works have been performed around the globe by ensembles such as Ensemble Dal Niente (US), Third Coast Percussion (US), Eighth Blackbird (US), Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra (FI), Avanti! (FI), Uusinta (FI), Defunensemble (FI), Dayjob Collective (FI), S.E.M. Ensemble (US/CZ), Caput (IS), and Cikada (NO).