Faculty

Dr. Chen Yi

Lorena Searcy Cravens/ Millsap/ Missouri Distinguished Professor of Composition

As a prolific composer who blends Chinese and Western traditions, transcending cultural and musical boundaries, Dr. Chen Yi is the recipient of the prestigious Charles Ives Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001, and a finalist of Pulitzer Prize with Si Ji (Four Seasons) for orchestra in 2006. She is the Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor at the Conservatory of Music and Dance at the University of Missouri-Kansas City since 1998, where she has received UMKC Kauffman Award in Artistry/Scholarship (2006) and in Faculty Service (2012). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2005.

Born in China, Chen Yi has received bachelor and master degrees in music composition from the Central Conservatory in Beijing, and Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Columbia University, New York, NY. 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, and Aptos Creative Arts Center (93-96) supported by Meet The Composer, and as a member of the composition faculty at Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University (1996–98).

Fellowships and commissioning awards have been received from Guggenheim Foundation (96), American Academy of Arts and Letters (96), Fromm Foundation at Harvard University (94), Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the Library of Congress (97), and National Endowment for the Arts in the United States (94). Honors include first prizes from the Chinese National Composition Competition (85 for chamber work and 12 for symphonic work), the Lili Boulanger Award (93), the NYU Sorel Medal Award (96), the CalArts/Alpert Award (97), the UT Eddie Medora King Composition Prize (99), the ASCAP Concert Music Award (01), the Elise Stoeger Award (02) from Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Friendship Ambassador Award from Edgar Snow Fund (02), Honorary Doctorates from Lawrence University (02), Baldwin-Wallace College (08), University of Portland (09), The New School University (10), and the University of Hartford in CT (2016). She has been appointed by the China Ministry of Education to the prestigious Cheung Kong Scholar Visiting Professor at the Beijing Central Conservatory of Music in 2006, and has become the Thousand-talents Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Tianjin Conservatory of Music in 2012.less

Her music is published by Theodore Presser Company, performed world wide, and recorded on Bis (02, 03, 04, 11), New Albion (97), CRI (99), Teldec (97, 99 w/ Grammy Award for Colors of Love, 03, 08), Nimbus (93/00), Cala (95), Avant (98), Atma (99), Hugo (00), Angel (01), Albany (04, 05, 06, 09), Koch International Classics (04), Delos (04), Centaur (04, 05, 15), Eroica (05), Capstone (06), Quartz (07), XAS (17), China Record Co. (86, 90, 13, 15, 17), New World (08, 09 w/ NPR Top 10 Classical Music Album Award for Sound of the Five) and Naxos (08, 09, 12, 15, 16 Grammy nomination for Symphony Humen 1839), among many others.

* Chen is family name, Yi is personal name. Chen Yi can be referred to Dr. Chen, Prof. Chen, Ms. Chen, or Chen Yi, but not Dr. Yi, Prof. Yi, or Ms. Yi.

 

Dr. Chen Yi

Dr. Chen Yi

Room 439, PAC
cheyi@umkc.edu
(816) 235-2911

 


Dr. Paul Rudy

Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Music Composition

Paul Rudy (b. 1962) is a Rome Prize (2010), Guggenheim (2008), Fulbright (1997) and Wurlitzer Foundation (2007 and 2009) Fellow. He has won the Sounds Electric ’07 Competition (1st Prize), EMS Prize (Sweden, 1st Prize), Citta di Udine (Prize ex aequo), and has received recognition and commissions from IMEB, Bourges (2008 commission), SEAMUS, Meet the Composer, the American Composer’s Forum, SCI, National Music Teacher’s Association.

He teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory where he received the 2008 Kauffman Award for Artistic Excellence. In 1994 he completed the Colorado Grand Slam after climbing all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000 ft. peaks. Rudy’s CD Series 2012 Stories is available online at iTunes.

Paul Rudy

Dr. Paul Rudy

Room 519A, PAC
rudyp@umkc.edu
(816) 235-2940
paulrudy.com

 


Dr. Zhou Long

Dr. Zhou Long

Room 438, PAC
zhoul@umkc.edu
(816) 235-2924

Dr. Zhou Long

Distinguished Professor of Music Composition

Zhou Long (b. July 8, 1953, Beijing) is internationally recognized for creating a unique body of music that brings together the aesthetic concepts and musical elements of East and West. Deeply grounded in the entire spectrum of his Chinese heritage, including folk, philosophical, and spiritual ideals, he is a pioneer in transferring the idiomatic sounds and techniques of ancient Chinese musical traditions to modern Western instruments and ensembles. His creative vision has resulted in a new music that stretches Western instruments eastward and Chinese instruments westward, achieving an exciting and fertile common ground.

Zhou Long was born into an artistic family and began piano lessons at an early age. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to a rural state farm, where the bleak landscape with roaring winds and ferocious wild fires made a profound and lasting impression. He resumed his musical training in 1973, studying composition, music theory, and conducting, as well as Chinese traditional music. In 1977, he enrolled in the first composition class at the reopened Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Following graduation in 1983, he was appointed composer-in-residence with the National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra of China. Zhou Long travelled to the United States in 1985 under a fellowship to attend Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-Chung, Mario Davidovsky, and George Edwards, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1993. After more than a decade as music director of Music From China in New York City, he received ASCAP’s Adventurous Programming Award in 1999, and its prestigious Concert Music Award in 2011.

 


Dr. Yotam Haber

Room 519A, PAC
ymhn4d@umkc.edu
(816) 235-

Dr. Yotam Haber

http://www.yotamhaber.com 

Associate Professor of Composition

His music hailed by New Yorker critic Alex Ross as “deeply haunting,” by the Los Angeles Times as one of five classical musicians “2014 Faces To Watch,” and chosen as one of the “30 composers under 40” by Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Project 440, Yotam Haber was born in Holland and grew up in Israel, Nigeria, and Milwaukee. He is the recipient of a 2017 Koussevitzky Commission, a 2013 Fromm Music Foundation commission, a 2013 NYFA award, the 2007 Rome Prize and a 2005 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He has received grants and fellowships from the MAP Fund (2016), New Music USA (2011, the New York Foundation for the Arts (2013), the Jerome Foundation (2008, the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation (2011), Yaddo, Bogliasco, MacDowell Colony, the Hermitage, ASCAP, and the Copland House.

In 2015, Haber’s first monographic album of chamber music, Torus, was hailed by New York’s WQXR as “a snapshot of a soul in flux – moving from life to the afterlife, from Israel to New Orleans – a composer looking for a sound and finding something powerful along the way.”

Recent commissions include works for Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor; an evening-length oratorio for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, CalARTS@REDCAT/Disney Hall (Los Angeles); New York-based Contemporaneous, Gabriel Kahane, and Alarm Will Sound; the 2015 New York Philharmonic CONTACT! Series; the Venice Biennale; Bang on a Can Summer Festival; Neuvocalsolisten Stuttgart and ensemble l’arsenale; FLUX Quartet, JACK Quartet, Cantori New York, the Tel Aviv-based Meitar Ensemble, and the Berlin-based Quartet New Generation.

Recent projects include New Water Music, an interactive work (2017) for the Louisiana Philharmonic and community musicians to be performed from boats and barges along the waterways of New Orleans and a chamber opera, The Voice Imitator, with librettist Royce Vavrek for the 92Y (2020).

Haber is Artistic Director Emeritus of MATA, the non-profit organization founded by Philip Glass that has, since 1996, been dedicated to commissioning and presenting new works by young composers from around the world. His music is published by RAI Trade.

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Dr. Ryan Oldham

Room 320, Grant Hall
oldhamrp@umkc.edu
(816) 235-2906

http://www.ryanoldham.com

Dr. Ryan Oldham

Adjunct Assistant Professor

Composer Ryan Oldham (b. 1977) is an adjunct instructor for the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance and teaches private lessons and theory classes at the UMKC Community Music and Dance Academy. He holds a B.M. from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1999), a M.M. from the University of Louisville (2002) for music composition and theory, and a D.M.A. from the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance (2008).

Oldham’s music has been performed in Sweden, Mexico, and the United States. His research on Henry Cowell was presented at the 34th Annual Conference of the Society for American Music. Oldham has been a guest clinician and resident composer for several organizations, including the Kentucky Opera, “Composers in the Schools”, and several high school music programs.