CHENG, Huihui
- CHENG, Huihui was born in 1985 in China.
She is studying under Prof Caspar Johannes Walter for Solistclass at University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart Germany, she is also PhD candidate under Jia Guoping at Centre Conservatory of Music in Beijing.
Her works has been performed at some music festivals around the world, including the 2005 Beijing Modern Music Festival, the 2006 Berlin Chinese culture Festival, the 2008 Munich Biennale, the 2009 Tongyeong International Music Festival in Korea, the 2010 Belgium Europe Festival, the 2010 Donaueschinger Musiktage-next generation.
Shining
This work is almost made up by Glissandi, since orchestra piece is not a new composition concept. In my own view, Glissando has a neutral feature of sounds, it includes many parameters of other sound features, so that it is a medium with multiple sound effects. For instance, there are microtones, even micro-rhythms and micro-tempos in Glissando, because the progress of its movement is not equal. This causes a lot of uncertainties in it as well as necessities, for uncertainty always exists necessarily. It is the uncertainty that arise my interests. I don’t want to treat Glissando only as a kind of articulation, or a form or structure of work, but want to intensively observe all its details and relations between them. In this works, Glissando is not adopted as an abstract sound material, nor as a tune for decoration, but used as base point or core of my work according to its multiple sound features, from which we can seek for more possibilities. For example, I always use Glissando in a framework of cords as a whole. In this framework, the whole chords are in movement because every tone in the chords has its own rhythm and direction, and all movements happen in the framework.
KOBAYASHI, Sumio
- Sumio Kobayashi (born 29 of December 1982) is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music. He has
received formal musical training, excelling with piano and composition, since 1985. Having studied with Joji Yuasa
and Hiroyuki Itoh, he won at the I.C.O.M.S. 29° Concorso Internazionale di Composizione, and at the Music
Competition of Japan. He has made appearances to festivals such as Takefu International Music Festival. He
majored in humanities at the Hitotsubashi University Graduate School.
The Plain of Grasses and Sapphire
The Plain of Grasses and Sapphire are the orchestral work intending to describe the natural scene by music.
Therefore, the elements used in these works are derived from the sound analysis of sound in their natural
environments, such as wind, rain, thunder, and the twitter of birds.
Another concept of this work is to treat music as information which has grammatical system. The term
“grammatical system” here is derived from the idea that some of the aspects of tonal music have grammatical
feature. Although some of the elements are derived from natural sounds, therefore, they seem to be similar to the
sound of tonal music as well.
KLARTAG, Yair
- Born in 1985 in Israel. He has graduated his Composition studies with Ruben Seroussi from the Buchmann-Mehta
School of Music at the Tel-Aviv University in 2010. He is currently studying his advanced composition studies at Basel
Musikhochschule with Georg Friedrich Haas. He won several awards and scholarships: 31st Irino Prize (Japan), 1st
place at the "I International Composition Competition Ireneu Segarra" (Spain), 2nd place at "SCCM international
composition competition" (China) etc
Background Music for Fundraising Event
The piece is based on testimonies of human suffering from different parts of the world. The testimonies are being
read by the orchestra members, being a contrapunctal action to their instrument playing. The starting point of the
piece was a criticism of the way we listen to human suffering. As the first section of the piece is built – we have too
many testimonies read in parallel and we cannot really listen to any of them. The human suffering becomes
background music for the conscience clearing which leads to a Catharsis. The experience of the orchestra members
– reading such horrible testimonies without being heard – may affect as well the pure musical process occurring.
After I had finished the first section, I have understood that my criticism is not directed outside towards the society,
but rather inside. I acknowledged the fact that by trying to express this message in music I am doing exactly the
same action as the fundraising event’s visitors – only clearing my conscience without truly listen or act in any way.
The last part culminates in the sentence “This art is quite useless” which refers to the introduction of Oscar Wilde’s
“The Picture of Dorian Gray”.
