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Ken Ueno
Biography
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer, vocalist, improviser, sound artist, and scholar.
Leading performers and ensembles around the world have championed Ueno’s music. His piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. Other ensembles and performers who have performed Ueno’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Frances-Marie Uitti, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, and Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players.
Ueno’s music has been performed at prestigious venues worldwide, including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, the GAIDA Festival, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Muziekgebouw, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, and Steim. He has served as a featured guest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival, the Norfolk Music Festival, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Pacific Rim Festival, the Intégrales New Music Festival, and the MANCA Festival. A portrait concert of his was showcased at MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011.
More recently, in August 2024, Ueno was a featured artist at the West Kowloon Cultural District’s Freespace Noise Fest. In the fall of 2024, he was the senior guest composer at the Takefu International Festival of Music, where his bass recorder concerto and a string quartet for the Arditti String Quartet was premiered. In December 2024, he was a featured artist at Wonderfruit in Thailand and at the IntAct Music Festival in Bangkok.
As a vocalist, Ueno is renowned for inventing extended techniques and has performed as a soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in Boston and New York, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and orchestras in Sacramento, Stony Brook, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, and Berkeley. He has collaborated with esteemed artists such as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Joey Baron, Joan Jeanrenaud, Pascal Contet, David Wessel, Robin Hayward, John Kelly, Jorrit Dykstra, Du Yun, Tyshawn Sorey, Ikue Mori, DJ Sniff, Biliana Voutchkova, and Steve Nerve. Additionally, he maintains ongoing duo collaborations with Kung Chi Shing, Viola Yip, Arnont Nongyao, Tim Feeney, Karen Yu, and Matt Ingalls.
As a sound artist, Ueno’s installations have been commissioned and exhibited by museums and galleries in Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei, Mexico City, Art Basel, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. Last fall, he created evening-long installation performances for the Osage Gallery, Tai Kwun, and the FreeSpace. One of his largest projects, Daedalus Drones—an installation featuring a fencelabyrinth housing a swarm of flying drones choreographed for performance—was showcased at the Asia Society of Hong Kong and featured in the New Vision Arts Festival.
Ueno currently serves as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His writings have been published in the Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, Ethics Press, and Wiley & Sons. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.M.A. from the Yale School of Music. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music. A monograph CD of Ueno’s orchestral concertos (including his vocal concerto) was released on BMOPsound. For more information, visit www.kenueno.com.