Ken Ueno

He studied at the United States Military Academy. He graduated from Berklee College of Music with a B.M. in Film Scoring/Composition Summa Cum Laude, from Boston University with a M.M., from Yale School of Music with a M.M.A., and from Harvard University with a PhD.

He taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.[1][2] He is co-director of Minimum Security Composers Collective.[3]

He has composed orchestral works, for jazz big band and woodwind quintet, and two dance pieces for the Boston Conservatory.[4] He performed at the Flea, New York City.[5] Ueno is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin.

Ueno has collaborated with violist Kim Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky on the works Hypnomelodiamachia for viola, percussion, and electronics (2007), and Two Hands, a Kashkashian commission, for viola and percussion (2009). A monograph compact disc of three works for soloist(s) and orchestra, Talus for viola and orchestra, On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis for solo throat-singer and orchestra, and Kaze-no-Oka for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra, was released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2010.[6] Ueno has also written for such ensembles as the So Percussion Group, Bang on a Can All-Stars, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Del Sol String Quartet,[7] Prism Quartet,[8] and eighth blackbird.[9]

Ueno's compositional approach frequently involves extra-musical modeling, including using images, cultural phenomena, or architecture as the basis for structural decisions, somewhat analogous to the use of architectural proportions in Renaissance music. Kaze-no-Oka, for example, reflects in part the structure of the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's like-named project.[10] His Talus is, in a manner of speaking, a biography of a traumatic event in the life of its soloist, violist Wendy Richman, who shattered her ankle in a ten-foot fall.[11] He is keenly interested in the process of exploring unique, in some sense irreproducible, sonic events linked to the performers for which his music is written.

As a performer, Ueno is active as a throat-singing vocalist and performing with live electronics.[12] He is an accomplished guitarist.

In 2010, he is the recipient of the Berlin Prize in Music Composition at the American Academy in Berlin.[13]

• 2010 Berlin Prize [14]
• 2007 Rome Prize
• Fromm Music Foundation grant
• Aaron Copland House grant
• Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording grant
• National Endowment for the Arts grant
• Belgian-American Education Foundation
• First Prize in the 25th "Luigi Russolo" competition
• Harvard University grant [15]

• "Ken Ueno: Talus", BMOP/sound, BMOP1014 [16]
• "I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea", in New Dialects, Centaur CRC 3038, Gregory Oakes, 2009 [17]
• "Synchronism Six-Zero", in One Minute More, Transatlantic Foundation for Music and Art B001J54A8S, Guy Livingston, 2008 [18]
• "Scrapyard Exotica," by Del Sol String Quartet, Sono Luminus (2015) (featuring "Peradam" (2012)

• Artist's website
• "Careers in Composition: Alumni Interview with Ken Ueno", Berklee College
• "Ken Ueno Interview", Composition Today
• "Ken Ueno (throat singer) and Joan Jeanrenaud (cello) @ BAM/PFA"
• "On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis", University of California, Berkeley, Sounds of the Music Department
• "Spotlight Session: Decoding Ken Ueno", Counterstream Audio
• "Music Now Class performs Ken Ueno's Piece for Pieces of Paper"
• American Academy in Berlin
• "Biography and recording/info on 2015 composition Zetsu" "San Francisco Contemporary Music Players