Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin Composer, Director, and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility (allosphere.ucsb.edu), is Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on creative computational systems, multi-modal media content, and facilities design. Her years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. The culmination of her creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal sphere inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, Caroline Shaw, will join the Corwin Chair Series via Zoom to discuss her musical background, current projects, and hold a Q & A. Following the discussion, she will coach a UCSB undergraduate string quartet on her piece entr'acte. Caroline Shaw is a New York-based musician—vocalist, violinist, composer, and producer—who performs in solo and collaborative projects. She was the youngest recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013 for Partita for 8 Voices, written for the Grammy-winning Roomful of Teeth, of which she is a member. Recent commissions include new works for Renée Fleming with Inon Barnatan, Dawn Upshaw with Sō Percussion and Gil Kalish, Seattle Symphony, Anne Sofie von Otter with Philharmonia Baroque, the LA Philharmonic, Juilliard 415, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s with John Lithgow, the Dover Quartet, TENET, The Crossing, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, the Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, the Baltimore Symphony, and Roomful of Teeth with A Far Cry. 

 

Dr. Kee Yong Chong, one of Malaysia’s leading contemporary music composers, possesses one of the most exciting voices in new music today. Indeed, his work has been hailed as “imaginative and poetic” by leading conductor-composer Peter Eötvös, and as “very inventive and artistically pure” by composer Jonathan Harvey. The uniqueness of his music stems not only from a rich palette of sounds, but his experimentation into traditions, infusing his own Chinese and multi-cultural Malaysian heritage into his work.