22 APRIL 2019

 

MELISSA HUI - HONG KONG

BORN 22 APRIL 

Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and raised in North Vancouver, British Columbia. She received her doctorate from Yale University and masters degree from the California Institute of the Arts. Her mentors include Mel Powell, Jacob Druckman, Martin Bresnick, Morton Subotnick and Earl Kim.

Initially inspired by the haunting music of the African pygmies and Japanese gagaku court orchestra, she strives to create a personal music of ethereal beauty, intimate lyricism, and raucous violence. 

Her commissions include works for the Oregon Symphony, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Kronos Quartet, St. Lawrence String Quartet, New Millennium Ensemble and Essential Music (NYC), Ensemble Antipodes (Switzerland), Dogs of Desire (of Albany Symphony), Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, New Music Concerts (Toronto), the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne and the Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec (Montréal), Melody of China/Citywinds (San Francisco), Tapestry New Opera Works, and a soundtrack for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square.

She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, Aaron Copland Fund, Meet the Composer, Opera.ca, ASCAP and Canada Council. Melissa won the Grand Prize of the CBC Young Composers' Competition and du Maurier/WSO Canadian Composers Competition, first prizes at SOCAN and ProCAN competitions, and was a finalist of the International Gaudeamus Music Competition. Her works are recorded on CRI, UMMUS, Santa Fe New Music, Centredisc, and Nisapa. Her most recent CD of solo and chamber works, And blue sparks burn, was released by Centredisc in 2006. 

Current projects include commissioned works for Ensemble Sospeso (NYC) and an oratorio based on a Cree myth with librettist Tomson Highway for Soundstreams Canada.

Now living in Montreal, she was a member of the composition faculty at Stanford University from 1994-2004.

♫ LISTEN

And Blue Sparks burn by Melissa Hui 

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MARIA TERESA PRIETO - SPAIN   

BORN 22 APRIL

María Teresa Prieto was a Spanish composer who lived and worked in Mexico. She was born in Oviedo in 1896 to a middle-class Asturian family. She studied with pianist and composer Saturnino del Fresno in Asturias and Benito de la Parra at the Conservatory of Madrid. She went to stay with her brother Carlos in Mexico in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War where she studied with Manuel Ponce and Carlos Chavez. She also studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1946 and 1947. She returned to Spain briefly in 1958 to receive the Samuel Ross prize for Modal Quartet, but never returned to live there.

Prieto's music was often based on folklore.

♫ LISTEN

Adagio e Fuga by María Teresa Prieto

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