Date: April 14 (Sat) Door: 7:00p
What does culture sound? Composer Kui Dong and Performer Yang Yi present a70 minutes musical experience that combines traditional Chinese classical and folk music to the contemporary and avant-garde.
About Yang Yi:
Yang Yi, guzheng master, is a leading virtuoso on the Chinese classical twenty-one-string zither. A winner of the International Chinese Instruments Competition, among other awards, Yang Yi is also a distinguished guzheng educator and lecturer and has served on the faculty of the prestigious China Conservatory of Music, her alma mater.As a soloist, Yang Yi has toured throughout Asia, Europe and the United States and has appeared at the Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Radio City Music Hall, Royal Albert Hall (UK), Historische Stadthalle Wupperal and Anhaltisches Theater Dessau in Germany, and etc.
After she moved to the United States in 1991, she has served as the music director at Eastern Culture and Performing Arts Center in New Jersey; the music director and master guzheng teacher at Princeton University Chinese Music Ensemble, the founder and chairperson of Chinese instrument competition program of the New Jersey Music Teacher Association, the first competition of its kind in America and Western music history; as well as the director of Yang Yi Guzheng Academy.
Her “performance was extraordinarily fantastic, intensive and passionate”, quoted by the West German News; “fascinating, surprising and extraordinarily beautiful” by the New York Times; and “She really sets the instrument on fire” by the Daily Record (NJ).
About Dong Kui:
Described by newspapers and magazines such as Washington Post, Gramophone International UK, and San Francisco Examiner as “exquisitely… ceaselessly compelling”, “exceptional beauty and imagination”, “ a hybrid sonic labyrinth”, Kui Dong‘s music has been performed and commissioned by numerous ensembles and received honors and prizes from a wide spectrum of prestigious institutions, including Spain’s Tenerife Symphony Orchestra, UK’s Arditti Quartet, Austria’s Ars Electronica, The new National Theatre of China, Del Sol Quartet, Volti, SFCMP, The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation and Library of Congress, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Meet the Composer, Central Ballet Group of China, ISCM, and ASCAP.
Her works written in US increasingly show a unique synthesis of influences from Avant-garde experimental, jazz, electro-acoustic and other ethnic music. She sometimes incorporates theatre, as well as non-western instruments and musical concepts into contemporary settings. Dong, on the faculty of Dartmouth College, also occasionally performs free improvisation on piano.Her music, including three full length CDs can be found on New World Records “Pangu’s Song” (2004) and Other Minds “Hands Like Waves Unfold” (2008) and “Since When Has The Bright Moon Existed” (2011).Dong’s current project includes a 65-miunte Chamber opera “Hu Tong (Narrow Alley) commissioned by Real Time opera in collaboration with Oberlin Conservatory and Cleveland Public Theatre funded by Argosy Foundation.
For more: http://www.shapeshifterlab.com