14 JULY 2019

UNSUK CHIN - SOUTH KOREA   
BORN 14 JULY

Unsuk Chin is a South Korean composer of classical music, who is based in Berlin, Germany. Chin began her journey with music at a fairly young age, as she taught herself how to play the piano and music theory. She was awarded the Grawemeyer Award in 2004, the Arnold Schönberg Prize in 2005, the Music Composition Prize of the Prince Pierre Foundation in 2010, the Ho-Am Prize in the Arts in 2012, the Wihuri Sibelius Prize in 2017, the Marie-Josée Kravis Prize of the New York Philharmonic in 2018, and the Bach Prize in 2019.

In 1988, Unsuk Chin worked as a freelance composer at the electronic music studio of the Technical University of Berlin, realizing seven works: her first electronic piece was called "Gradus ad Infinitum" which was composed in 1989. Her first large orchestral piece, Troerinnen (1986) for women's voices, was premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in 1990.  In 1991, her breakthrough work Acrostic Wordplay was premiered by the Nieuw Ensemble. Since then it has been performed in more than 20 countries in Europe, Asia and North America. Chin's collaboration with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, which has led to several commissions from them, started in 1994 with Fantaisie mecanique. Since 1995, Unsuk Chin has been published exclusively by Boosey & Hawkes.  In 1999, Chin began an artistic collaboration with Kent Nagano, who has since premiered six of her works.

Unsuk Chin's works have been performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Philharmonia Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Kronos Quartet, Hilliard Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Arditti Quartet, London Sinfonietta and Ensemble musikFabrik, amongst others.

 In 2001/2002, Unsuk Chin was appointed composer-in-residence at Deutschen Symphonie-Orchester Berlin; since 2006 she has held the position of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra's composer-in-residence and artistic director of its Contemporary Music Series, which she founded herself at the invitation of the orchestra's chief conductor Myung-Whun Chung and in which so far 200 Korean premieres of central works of classical modernism and contemporary music have been presented, including commissioned works by Peter Eötvös, Pascal Dusapin, Tristan Murail, York Höller, Jukka Tiensuu, Ivan Fedele and Anders Hillborg. In 2016, Chin was appointed Artistic Advisor of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. Since 2011, she has overseen the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra's Music of Today series at the invitation of its chief conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen.

♫ LISTEN

Alice in Wonderland (extract)  by Unsuk Chin

➺ Fins scores by Unsuk Chin

PETRA STUMP-LINSHALM - AUSTRIA

BORN 14 JULY

Petra  Stump-Linshalm studied clarinet at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and bass clarinet at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. As a bearer of various prizes and awards - ia. BA-CA Artist of the Year 2006, 1st Prize at the Chain Concours 2001, 2nd Prize at the Concours Nicati 2011 - her particular attention is paid not only to the classical repertoire, but also to contemporary, experimental and improvised music. She is the dedicatee of numerous world premieres and has worked with important composers such as Pierluigi Billone, Chaya Czernowin, Beat Furrer, Bernhard Gander, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others. Time and again composers have composed works for Petra Stump-Linshalm and her ensembles that will enrich the clarinet literature in the long term.

The duo Stump-Linshalm has drawn with the 2005 on ein_klang records published CD born to be off-road interim review of the cooperation with contemporary composers. The pasticcio award of Radio Austria 1 honors this work. This was followed by further recordings in the duo 2006 1 + 1 = 1 at KAIROS, 2010 Short Cuts at ein_klang records and 2012 Mozart Rarities at Gramola. Petra Stump & Heinz-Peter Linshalm are publishers of the clarinet school "CLARINET UPDATE - New Music for Young Clarinetists" published by Doblinger.

The conveyance of contemporary and classical music to children in the form of concerts and workshops complements the creative field of the artist.

In 2014 she completed an extensive further education on the topic "music physiology" at the Kurt Singer Institute / University of Arts Berlin.

Her compositional work is inseparable from her activity as a performing instrumentalist. Her experiences - not only related to her own instrument - flow into the semantics of her work.

Petra Stump-Linshalm is a member of ensemble xx. century and since 2012 Senior Lecturer for Chamber Music at the Joseph Haydn Institute for Chamber Music and Special Ensembles at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

Trotzig by Petra Stum-Linshalm

➺ Petra's Website

9 JULY 2019

ELISABETH LUTYENS - UK  
BORN 9 JULY

Elisabeth Lutyens was born in London in 1906. She was one of the five children of the architect Edwin Lutyens and his wife Emily, who was a member of the aristocratic Bulwer-Lytton family. Elisabeth was the elder sister of the writer Mary Lutyens and niece of the suffragette Constance Bulwer-Lytton.

At age nine she began to aspire to be a composer. In 1922, Lutyens pursued her musical education in Paris at the École Normale de Musique, which had been established a few years previously. She accompanied her mother to India in 1923. On her return to Europe she studied with John Moulds and subsequently continued her musical education from 1926 to 1930 at the Royal College of Music in London as a pupil of Harold Darke.

In 1933, Lutyens married Ian Glennie, a baritone singer, and together they had a son and twin daughters. The marriage was not happy, however, and in 1938 she left Glennie for Edward Clark, a conductor and former BBC producer who had studied with Schoenberg. Clark and Lutyens had another child (a son) in 1941 and married on 9 May 1942. She composed in complete isolation, a process greatly impeded by the drinking and partying at the Clark flat, and the responsibilities of motherhood.

She disapproved of the 'overblown sound' of Gustav Mahler and similar composers, and instead chose to work with sparse textures.

Lutyens is credited with bringing Schoenbergian serial technique (albeit her own personal interpretation of it) to Britain. She developed her own type of serialism; she first used a 12-note series in Chamber Concerto I for 9 instruments (1939), but earlier than this she had been using the techniques of inversion and retrograde fundamental to a serial idiom, and she stated she had been inspired to this by precedents she found in older British music, especially Henry Purcell.

She did not always employ or limit herself to 12-note series; some works use a self-created 14-note progression, for instance. She was very fond of the music of Claude Debussy, and she became close friends with Luigi Dallapiccola. However, her negative opinions of strict serialism caused an ideological rift between herself and her serialist colleagues.

♫ LISTEN

Five Bagatelles by Elisabeth Lutyens

➺ Find scores by Elisabeth Lutyens

SUNGJI HONG - SOUTH KOREA  

BORN 9 JULY

Sungji Hong studied composition with Kyungsun Suh at the Hanyang University in Seoul. Subsequently completed her MMus with Robert Saxton and Paul Patterson at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and her Ph.D. in composition with Nicola LeFanu at the University of York in the UK.

​She has participated in various workshops and masterclasses such as Voix Nouvelles (Royaumont) and in Darmstadt where she studied with Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, Theo Loevendie, Tristan Murail and Toshio Hosokawa, as well as the International mastercourse and workshop for conductors and composers with Peter Eotvos and Zsolt Nagy in Herrenhaus Edenkoben.

Over the last decade, Sungji's music has been performed by leading players and ensembles in over 44 countries and 194 cities. Her music has been widely broadcast in more than 17 countries (37 channels) and has been recorded and released on the Soundbrush, Elektramusic, Atoll, Dutton label and by ECM Records. Her music is published by Da Vinci Edition, SEEMSA and Tetractys Publishing.

​Her creative output ranges from works for solo instruments to full orchestra, as well as choral, ballet and electroacoustic music. Her works have been commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation (Harvard University, USA), the National Flute Association (NFA), the Tongyoung International Music Festival (Korea), the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra (Korea), the Keumho Asiana Cultural Foundation (Korea), the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music (USA), the International Isang Yun Music Society (Germany) and the MATA Festival (USA).

​She has won Franz Josef Reinl-Stiftung (1st Prize), Magistralia (1st Prize), Ilshin Composition Prize (1st Prize), In Nova Musica Competition (1st Prize), the Jesus Villa Rojo (1st Prize), the European Competition of the State Conservatory of Thessaloniki (1st Prize), the Temple Music Composition Prize (1st Prize), the Crwth Competition (1st Prize), the international competition for original ballet music at the ISCM World Music Days – Slovenia (1st Prize), the Montserrat International Camera Music Composition Competition (1st Prize), the Salvatore Martirano Composition Competition (2nd Prize), the Dimitris Mitropoulos International Competition (2nd Prize), the Theodore Front Prize (IAWM), the Yoshiro Irino Memorial Prize (ACL), the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers Scholarship, and several other prizes and awards.

​Since 2018, Hong has been teaching composition at the University of North Texas..

Bisbiglio by Sungji Hong 

➺ Sungji Hong's Website