Shulamit Ran

Margaret Brouwer

Margaret Brouwer

Joanne Martin

Joanne Martin is a Canadian violist, composer, Suzuki teacher and Suzuki teacher trainer. Her career has included performing as a violist with numerous orchestral and chamber groups including the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, and Concertante Chamber Players. Since her graduation from the University of Winnipeg, Joanne has taught using the Suzuki Method. She has been appointed a Suzuki Teacher Trainer by both the Suzuki Association of the Americas and the European Suzuki Association. Joanne now divides her time between Winnipeg, Canada and Montpellier, France. She has taught, lectured, and performed at prestigious conferences and workshops in many countries. Her compositions and arrangements are performed worldwide by students and professionals.

Cui Shiguang

Shiguang Cui (崔世光) (b. 1948) is a Chinese composer and pianist. To celebrate the 2008 Summer Olympic Games held in Beijing, his work Concerto for Ten Concert Grand Pianos and Orchestra was commissioned by the Dean of the National Center for the Performing Arts, Mr. Ping Chen. Ten internationally-renowned pianists were invited to give the world premiere on August 19, 2008. The pianists were Claude Frank, Phillippe Entremont, Vladimir Feltsman, Louis Lortie, Yunyi Qin (秦云轶), Shikun Liu (刘诗昆), Lang Lang (郎朗), Cyprien Katsaris, Guillermo Gonzalez, and Sha Chen (陈萨).1 This piece was originally conceived as Concerto for Ten Concert Grand Pianos and Orchestra, and was composed in 2008 with the title China Jubilee (喜庆中国). The original concerto for ten pianos was never published. The only published edition of this work is for two pianos, with the second piano serving as the orchestral reduction, with a different title: Piano Concerto No. 2.2 The work contains four movements. My dissertation contains four chapters. Chapter I, a brief history of the development of keyboard instruments in China, includes information about several important pianists who contributed to the development of the piano and to Chinese piano music. Chapter II gives an overview of Shiguang Cui’s career as a composer, his works for the keyboard, and background information on the Piano Concerto No. 2. Chapter III contains a stylistic analysis of the Concerto No. 2, including pentatonic scale techniques, use of the interval of a fourth, and the employment of traditional Chinese textural techniques as well as Western rhythmic and textural compositional techniques. Chapter IV discusses the influence of Chinese traditional musical elements in the Piano Concerto No. 2. These include Chinese folksongs and dances, quotation from Chinese operas, and the influence of Chinese instruments. Piano Concerto No. 2 is an important contribution to the genre and to the development of Chinese piano music. My hope is that more Chinese works will be composed, and that more pianists will be inspired to learn and perform Cui’s Piano Concerto No. 2 as well as his solo piano music.

Yao Henglu

Born in China in 1941, Chu Wang-Hua’s compositions were first played at the First National Music Week of China when he was aged just 14 years old. He studied piano and composition at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing, and was appointed a lecturer there following his graduation. Chu Wang-Hua came to Australia in the late 1980s to pursue postgraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, where he studied composition with Peter Tahourdin, and the piano with Donald Thornton. He graduated with a Master of Music in 1986, and following further studies in Melbourne and the USA was awarded a Doctor of Music degree in 1988. He received the Albert Maggs Composition prize in 1987, and has been a represented composer with the Australian Music Centre since 1988. Since arriving in Australia Chu Wang-Hua has composed a number of pieces, including symphonies, string quartets, piano concertos, and other works. His compositions have been performed and recorded around the world. Two of his symphonies, Ash Wednesday and Autumn Cry, have been performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, while The Borderland Moon, for soprano, sextet and percussion, was performed at the First Contemporary Chinese Composers Festival in Hong Kong. His Piano Sonatina was awarded a prize at the 21st Century Chinese Children’s Piano Compositions Competition in 2000. Chu Wang-Hua was recently invited by the Chinese Cultural Council to give a number of piano recitals of his own work at Beijing Concert Hall and other venues in September 2002. His book, Selected Works for Piano by Chu Wang-Hua, published by the Music Publishing House of China, will be launched during his tour.

Fang Xiaomin

Zhang Chun

Zhang Chun

Zhang Zhou

James Lee III

Bun-Ching Lam

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.

Jun Nagao

Jun Nagao (Japanese: 長生 淳; born March 1, 1964) is a Japanese composer. Nagao began his career as an arranger for orchestras and wind ensembles. Today he is known for his many original compositions including several works for video games and films. He won the 2000 Toru Takemitsu Composition Award for his work entitled L'été-L'oubli rouge.

Gabriela Ortiz

Latin Grammy-nominated Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today and one of the most vibrant musicians emerging on the international scene. Her musical language achieves an extraordinary and expressive synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde by combining high art, folk music and jazz in novel, frequently refined and always personal ways. Her compositions are credited for being both entertaining and immediate as well as profound and sophisticated; she achieves a balance between highly organized structure and improvisatory spontaneity. Gustavo Dudamel, the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, called her recent work Téenek “one of the most brilliant I have ever directed. Its color, its texture, the harmony and the rhythm that it contains are all something unique. Gabriela possesses a particular capacity to showcase our Latin identity.” Ortiz has written music for dance, theater and cinema, and has actively collaborated with poets, playwrights, and historians. Indeed, her creative process focuses on the connections between gender issues, social justice, environmental concerns and the burden of racism, as well as the phenomenon of multiculturality caused by globalization, technological development, and mass migrations. She has composed three operas, in all of which interdisciplinary collaboration has been a vital experience. Notably, these operas are framed by political contexts of great complexity, such as the drug war in Only the Truth, illegal migration between Mexico and the United States in Ana and her Shadow, and the violation of university autonomy during the student movement of 1968 in Firefly. Based in Mexico, Ortiz’s music has been commissioned and performed all over the world by prestigious ensembles, soloists and orchestras, such as: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Gustavo Dudamel and Esa Pekka Salonen, Zoltan Kocsis, Carlos Miguel Prieto, the Kroumata and Amadinda Percussion Ensembles, the Kronos Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Sarah Leonard, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Pierre Amoyal, Southwest Chamber Music, the Tambuco Percussion Quartet, the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Malmo Symphony Orchestra, the Orquestra Simón Bolivar, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, among others. Recent premieres include: Yanga and Téenek, both pieces commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, Luciérnaga (Firefly, her third opera) commissioned and produced by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Únicamente la Verdad (Only the Truth, her first opera) with Long Beach Opera and Opera de Bellas Artes in Mexico. Ortiz has been honored with the National Prize for Arts and Literature, the most prestigious award for writers and artists granted by the government of Mexico, and has been inducted into the Mexican Academy of the Arts. Other honors include: the Bellagio Center Residency Program, Civitella Ranieri Artistic Residency; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Fulbright Fellowship; first prize in the Silvestre Revueltas National Chamber Music Competition; first prize in the Alicia Urreta Composition Competition; a Banff Center for the Arts Residency; the Inroads Commission (a program of Arts International with funds from the Ford Foundation); a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation; and the Mozart Medal Award. Born in Mexico City, her parents were musicians in the renowned folk music ensemble Los Folkloristas, founded in 1966 to preserve and record the traditional music of Mexico and Latin America. She trained with the eminent composer Mario Lavista at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música and Federico Ibarra at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 1990 she was awarded the British Council Fellowship to study in London with Robert Saxton at The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1992 she received a scholarship from the UNAM to complete her Ph.D. studies in electroacoustic music composition with Simon Emmerson at The City University in London. Ortiz currently teaches composition at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City and as a Visiting Professor at Indiana University. Her music is currently published by Schott, Ediciones Mexicanas de Música, Saxiana Presto, and Tre Fontane.