A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist who is currently a Professor at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Jerry and Evelyn Hemmings Chambers Distinguished Professor Chair in Music. Ensembles and performers who have played Ken’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Wendy Richman, Greg Oakes, BMOP, Alarm Will Sound, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Nieuw Ensemble, and Frances-Marie Uitti. His music has been performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, the Muziekgebouw, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, Other Minds, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, Steim, and at the Norfolk Music Festival. Ken’s 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. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. In 2012, he was a featured artist on Other Minds 17. In 2014, Frances-Mairie Uitti and the Boston Modern Orchestra premiered his concerto for two-bow cello and orchestra, and Guerilla Opera premiered a run of his chamber opera, Gallo, to critical acclaim. He has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in New York and Boston, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, and with orchestras in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and California. Ken holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. A monograph CD of three orchestral concertos was released on the Bmop/sound label. His bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.

April Faith-Slaker is a cellist, composer, and researcher who embraces an interdisciplinary, multimedia approach to understanding and communicating about human experiences and social policy. With classical training on cello and advanced degrees in law, research methods and social policy, she is interested in expanding conversations about social issues beyond the traditional modes of communication, and believes that the arts can be used as an alternative lens for approaching these topics and expanding the terms of political discourse. 

As a fellow at the Union for Contemporary Art (http://www.u-ca.org/) in 2014, April began a data composition project. The project utilizes public data, math, and technology to translate complex social issues into auditory representations. Video presentation of the works allows for a multifaceted experience of each of the data sets. The charts and graphs presented in each video merge musical conversions and the fundamental data artifacts from the original source material. The charts and graphs represent a traditional method of communicating about these data, while the corresponding soundscapes played with the video demonstrate the auditory translation.

Video presentation of the complete set of soundscapes can be found on April’s website: www.aprilfaithslaker.com. 

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