One of World’s Great Asian Music Virtuosos Plans Performance Lecture at UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo will host a performance lecture on traditional Korean music by virtuoso performer and composer Kim Jin Hi at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 28 in the Screening Room, Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst) Campus.

It will be free of charge and open to the public. A reception for Kim, a distinguished Korean artist of international celebrity, will follow.

As a virtuoso on the komungo, an indigenous, 4th-century fretted Korean zither, Kim pioneered the fusion of Asian traditional music with Western contemporary music, often marrying voice, electronic and computer elements to the traditional sounds of flute, oboe, English horn and zither.

Her work brings prominent traditional Korean musicians together with leading American and international performers, often for the first time, culminating, in the words of one critic, in a "unique formation of one cross-cultural sonic bridge where cultural posturing fades and music breathes."

For 15 years, she has worked to international acclaim with such performers as Elliott Sharp, James Newton, Eugene Chadbourne and the Kronos Quartet, composing works that articulate the Korean idea that each tone is alive and possesses its own shape, and that "music" exists in the transitory sound-moment.

With notably deft manipulation of her implement, Kim is said to "disclose," rather than "perform," the music, drawing myriad sounds from ancient instruments and imparting new breath and life to individual tones.

Critic Josef Woodard of The Los Angeles Times has written that Kim's compositions and performances manifest "new music/world music at its finest, beyond political correctness...(she takes it) into the realm of the sublime, where words and cultural postures fall away."

Her work has been presented at many noted international venues, including the Lincoln Center Festival, Juilliard School's Focus Festival '96, Carnegie Hall, Germany's Darmstadt

Festival, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, Germany's Festival Nieuwe Muziek, London's Institute for Contemporary Art and New Zealand's Asian Pacific Festival.

Kim has received commissions from Lincoln Center, Kronos Quartet, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.

The UB lecture-performance complements a Sept. 29 concert by Kim and her performance trio, Quagmire, at 8 p.m in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St.

The event will be sponsored by the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the Asian Studies Program, the Korean Language and Culture Program and the UB Center for the Arts. Generous support has been provided by the Korea Society.

For further information, call Hye-won Choi, 645-6000, ext. 1101, or the UB Asian Studies Program, 645-3474.