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28th Annual New Music & Art Festival

The 28th Annual New Music & Art Festival takes place October 17–20, 2007. This year’s festival will include performances by the award-winning Enso String Quartet, pipa virtuoso Zhou Yi and many BGSU student and faculty ensembles. The festival includes concerts, film screenings, lectures, exhibitions, workshops and other exciting opportunities. Organized by the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music and the Fine Arts Center Galleries, the festival supports the creation of new work and engages both the University and city communities in the process of art appreciation and awareness. The majority of events are free and open to the public.

A prolific composer who blends Chinese and Western traditions, transcending cultural and musical boundaries, special guest composer Chen Yi is the recipient of the prestigious Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. She is the Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2005. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music composition from the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and a doctorate from Columbia University. Her composition teachers have included Wu Zu-qiang, Chou Wen-chung, Mario Davidovsky and Alexander Goehr. She has served as Composer-in-Residence for the Women’s Philharmonic, the vocal ensemble Chanticleer, at the Aptos Creative Arts Center supported by Meet The Composer and as a member of the composition faculty at Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Liberary of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts. Honors include a first prize from the Chinese National Composition Competition, the Lili Boulanger Award, the NYU Sorel Medal Award, the CalArts/Alpert Award, the UT Eddie Medora King Composition Prize, the ASCAP Concert Music Award, the Elise Stoeger Award fromthe Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Friendship Ambassador Award from the Edgar Snow Fund, an honorary doctorate from Lawrence University and the UMKC Kauffman Award in Artistry/Scholarship. In 2006 she was appointed by the China Ministry of Education to the prestigious three-year Changjiang Scholar Visiting Professor post at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music.

The critically acclaimed Enso String Quartet takes its name from the Japanese Zen Buddhist painting of the circle. Since winning the Concert Artists Guild International Competition in 2003, the quartet has captured top prizes in international competitions and appeared throughout the U.S., Central America and Europe. The ensemble’s recording of the Six String Quartets, Op. 2, of Ignaz Pleyel for the Naxos label, their debut CD, received rave reviews including from Fanfare magazine: “extraordinary talent…exceptional sense of vitality and elegance.” The quartet will perform a concert of new music at 8 p.m. on Thursday, October 18, in Kobacker Hall.

Zhou Yi, pipa soloist, graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in China. She has won many prizes, including the first prize of the Shanghai Spring Music Festival in 1983, the Outstanding Performance Award of the Art Cup International Chinese Traditional Instruments Contest in 1989 and the White Magnolia Award for Extraordinary Expertise in the Fine Arts (N.Y.) in 1998. As a soloist she has toured to Japan, Singapore Taiwan, Hong Kong and Italy with the group Chinese National Music. In 1998 she was invited to perform and lecture throughout the United States. She has performed at venues including Merkin Concert Hall, Pickman Concert Hall (Mass.), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Eastman School of Music. Currently a guest lecturer at New York University, her music has been recorded on the Moon in Sky label and published by New Era Sound & Video Company of Guang Zhou and Nanjing Video Publishing House of China. Accomplished in the traditional repertoire, she is also an active performer of contemporary music. Her playing has been praised for its meticulous technique and expressivenes.

View the full schedule of events