FOCUS Festival Information now available in Chinese: Chen Yi’s music sounds both modern and ancient. Her music manages to sound both authentic and unexpected, which is what you always want from art. Chen Yi’s music is about storytelling and theater, and a search for striking and original effects … Orchestra players whisper, string instruments scurry, the high and low possibilities of winds are tested, and timpani explode like cannonfire... FOCUS Festival Office
FOCUS Festival Announcement
FOCUS Festival Details
-- Yo Yo Ma, Cellist
-- Bernard Holland, The New York Times
Now Available:
Q and A with Dr. Chen!
440/826-8070
mswendse@bw.edu
Margaret Swendseid, Coordinator
FOCUS 2008: Dr. Chen Yi
October 30 through November 2
Gamble Auditorium, Kulas Musical Arts Building
96 Front Street, Berea, Ohio
All events FREE and open to the public
Thursday, October 30, 3 pm
Convocation and Composition Forum with Dr. Chen Yi
Friday, October 31, 8 pm
Student Contemporary Music Ensemble “l(a” Concert
broadcast live on WCLV 104.9 FM or www.wclv.com
Saturday, November 1, 2 pm
Composition Master Class
Saturday, November 1, 8 pm
Large Ensemble Concert including Orchestra, Wind Ensemble and Choirs
Sunday, November 2, 4 pm
Faculty Chamber Music Concert
Complete FOCUS Festival Schedule details and repertoire available here.
2008 FOCUS Contemporary Music Festival features First Asian and First Woman Composer in First-ever Free Concerts
The 2008 FOCUS Contemporary Music Festival, a complement to Baldwin-Wallace’s celebrated annual Bach Festival, is aglitter in “firsts” this year. The internationally renowned Dr. Chen Yi will become the first woman and first Asian composer to take center stage in the 24-year history of FOCUS.
If this isn’t enough to make you race to Gamble Auditorium from October 30 through November 2, consider another first: admission to each concert in the FOCUS Festival is free this year as a result of a grant; The FOCUS Festival is generously funded by Cuyahoga County residents through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture . The $37,500 grant will support both the FOCUS and Bach festivals at B-W.
“I am profoundly honored and grateful to have a composer of Dr. Chen’s caliber at the heart of our FOCUS Festival this season,” says Peter Landgren, Conservatory Director at Baldwin-Wallace College. “My objective has been to increase the Conservatory’s global reach, and Dr. Chen’s visit to campus will provide a perfect launching pad in this effort.” Landgren first became familiar with Chen when both served on the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory in the 1990s.
“Recipient of the coveted Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dr. Chen is applauded on every continent by some of the world’s leading conductors, soloists and ensembles as one of the greatest living composers. Her work needs no translation: it is universal in spirit, rooted in human passion and a love of nature. B-W students and faculty are in for an extraordinary musical journey. They will also find Dr. Chen to be a warm, engaging and passionate teacher,” adds Landgren.
The FOCUS Festival typically features a concert series over a three-day period that showcases the composer’s work. The 2008 concerts are performed by large ensembles, faculty chamber ensembles and a student contemporary music ensemble. The featured composer also conducts master classes and composition seminars throughout the week leading up to the Festival's concerts.
Merging East-West Music “in Your Blood”
Dr. Chen’s music has been described as extraordinarily vigorous, imaginative and exuberant. “Fusion” is a term often used to describe the works of contemporary Chinese composers – Dr. Chen, Huang Ruo, Tan Dun, and perhaps it has become a cliché.
The concept of deep learning is a favorite theme of Dr. Chen as she applies it to the merging of Eastern and Western music. “I believe that if you study cultures deeply and not just on the surface, then you can make them merge naturally. Not until we learn both cultures in our gut and in our language can we express our own creative voice through these media. For instance, many of us write for Western instruments without knowing their roots and history. Then, no matter what music -- Eastern or Western -- you add on top it sounds artificial. But if you can merge them in your blood, then they sound natural together,” she says.
From Hauling Stone to the Sorel Medal
A native of Guangzhou in southern China, Dr. Chen grew up with parents who were medical doctors and who were impassioned about Western classical music. She started studying violin and piano when she was three. She was also a child of China’s Cultural Revolution, in which her parents were forced to perform hard labor and she, herself, had to get up at 4 a.m. frequently to haul 100 pounds of stone and mud from the foot of a mountain all the way to the top. Nonetheless, nothing stopped the young girl from reveling in the beauty of nature or from enjoying the scent of a field. Often, she used her spare time playing violin to poorer country children and farmers. Witnessing the latter’s joy surrounded by nature, Dr. Chen began to pay attention to her own Chinese culture, language and, particularly, music, as she had grown up with Mozart ringing in her ears. Dr. Chen entered the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music, where she was further trained in Chinese traditional and Western classical music. Then, she returned to the countryside to learn folk songs.
In 1986, Dr. Chen became China’s first woman to receive a master’s degree in composition from the Central Conservatory. “In China, there was more of a sense of equality between men and women; I never thought that composition was something that only men could do,” she says. She referred to a time when, as a child, she was deeply moved by the great classical Western composers, only to discover later that “they were all dead white men,” she exclaims with a laugh.
Dr. Chen later earned her doctorate in musical arts at Columbia University in New York. Dr. Chen has received numerous prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and other organizations. Other honors include New York University’s Sorel Medal, a Grammy Award, ASCAP’s Adventurous Programming and Concert Music awards and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Elise Stoeger Award. Joining the faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 1996, she is currently the Lorena Searcy Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Composition there.
In 2006, the China Ministry of Education appointed Dr. Chen to the highly prized three-year Changjiang Scholar Visiting Professorship program at the Beijing Central Conservatory.
The Baldwin-Wallace College FOCUS Contemporary Music Festival was established in 1984 as a complement to the annual Bach Festival. Its purpose is to promote art music of our time. During the past fifteen years FOCUS festivals have presented such celebrated composers as William Bolcom, Loris Chobanian, John Corigliano, Lukas Foss, Karel Husa, Witold Lutoslawski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Gunther Schuller and Joseph Schwantner to the music community of Northeast Ohio. Join us this year for the exciting works and performance of Chen Yi.
275 Eastland Rd.