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52nd Commissioned Composer Concert is April 5

March 22, 2018 – The University of Wisconsin-River Falls will welcome featured composer Young Jo Lee to Abbott Concert Hall on Thursday, April 5, at 7:30 p.m. for the university’s 52nd Commissioned Composer concert. The concert is free and open to the public.

Lee, of South Korea, is on campus April 3-5 for a three-day residency. He will also present a convocation in 129 Kleinpell Fine Arts on April 5 at 3 p.m., where he will discuss his new composition.

Lee is chairman of the Board of Directors of the Korea Arts and Culture Education Organization and he chairs the Korea Arts and Culture Education Support Committee which is part of the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.

Lee's music is characterized by strong Korean feelings with a German theoretical influence. His compositions cover many styles and mediums. The April 5 concert will feature United Hands, a group of four nationally-known musicians from Seoul who perform on piano.

Each year, UW-River Falls commissions a composer to write a piece of music for the student body. The composer also makes a campus visit to interact with the students and take part in the premiere performance of that work.

UWRF Professor Emeritus Conrad De Jong began the Commissioned Composer Project in 1967. It is the longest-standing program of its kind in the United States and places a national spotlight on the UW-River Falls Music Department.

Lee studied with Carl Orff and Wilhelm Killmayer at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Munich, Germany, from 1977-80. He continued his doctoral studies at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago in 1986 and subsequently served as chairman of the Theory and Composition Department there from 1989-94.

He was featured as guest composer at the New Music Festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music in Würzburg, Germany, Budapest and Amsterdam in 1985-86. He was also composer-in-residence at the New Music Festival in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Moscow Autumn Festival in 2005-06. Lee has worked as professor of composition and dean of the Korean National University of Arts School of Music from 1994-2008. He has also served as director of Korea’s National Institute for the Gifted in Arts. His chamber music, choral music, and orchestral works including the opera Whang-Jinie are well known in Asia, the U.S. and Europe.

For more information, email patti.cudd@uwrf.edu or call the UW-River Falls Music Department at 715-425-3183.

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