Liliya Ugay, Composer

for piano and live electronics - demo recording

Nostalgia-demo (2013)

Omnibus ensemble at 45th International Darmstadt Festival of New Music 2010

Slipping Dreams (2010)

violin - Yuki Numata Resnick, cello - T.J. Borden, piano - Liliya Ugay

Third World Fable for piano trio (2014)

Liliya Ugay "Oblivion", premiere by Yale Philharmonia and Heejung Park (conductor), 12/10/15, Woolsey hall, New Haven. CT

Oblivion for orchestra (2015)

Beautiful and Blind (2015)

The Next Festival for Emerging Artists orchestra, conductor - Peter Askim

Sospiri (2016)

Molinari Quartet, Conservatory of Montreal

String Quartet No. 2 (2013)

Jin-Xiang Yu, Soprano
Yale Philharmonia
Lyrics by Sokunthary Svay

Liliya Ugay, Morning Call

performed by Yale Philharmonia, conductor - David Yi
December 7th, 2017, Woolsey hall, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
To the Lost World was commissioned and premiered by Peter Askim and Raleigh Civic Chamber Orchestra on April 2nd, 2017 in Raleigh, NC at the concert dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Russian Revolution.

Ugay - To The Lost World

Music by Liliya Ugay, text by Sokunthary Svay

Performed by Norfolk Festival Chamber Choir and ensemble; conductor - Simon Carrington, soloist - Bradley Sharpe (countertenor) and Ilya Poletaev (harpsichord), Norfolk Summer Festival 2018, Norfolk, CT

Point of Entry
(written by Sokunthary Svay specially for this piece )

You are awake again

pushing out my insides.

Is it your foot, your hand? 


Now you cry

outside my body 

inside this bedroom

angry and helpless cries    

from your exit. 


I can’t dream

when your cries cut 

through the air. 


Drink this food

my body makes for you

at times in pain, 

yet again and again 

in my love for you.

My desire

keeps you alive. 


Oh, how you have entered my life

dear child. 




What next? 


What now? 


I’m hungry. 


Hold me.


I feel you. 


Don’t leave me. 


Help me. 


Mama. 


I’m waiting for you. 


I’m here.

Ugay - Point Of Entry

Performed by Eppes Quartet (Nina Kim, Pedro Maia, Albert Magcalas, Vincent Leung)
1. De-bug
2. Grace

In February 2017, the president of Yale University, Peter Salovey, announced that Yale's Calhoun Residential College, named after John Calhoun - a white supremacist and a national leader who passionately promoted slavery, - was finally to be renamed as Grace Hopper College, in honor of Grace Murray Hopper, a trailblazing computer scientist who also served as a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. To celebrate this occasion, Hopper College organized a series of events dedicated to her memory. "Hopper" quartet was written as a commission from Florrie Marshall and Yale Hopper College and premiered by Kate Arndt, Mathew Woodart, Florrie Marshall, and Guilherme Monegatto on October 3, 2018 in New Haven, CT.
De-bug: The term, that is nowadays known as the process of identifying and removing errors from computer hard(soft)ware, is commonly attributed to Grace Hopper. In 1947, Hopper, allegedly, found an actual insect inside of Harvard’s Mark II Aiken Relay computer that caused its malfunctioning. She made a note “First actual case of bug being found.”
Hopper was known not only for her outstanding intellect and professional excellence, but also keen and witty sense of humor that inspired me to write this metrically tricky and capricious first movement. De-bug builds on 13/8 (2/4+3/8+3/8+3/8) metric frame. In the beginning, the instruments play in rhythmic unison but gradually fall out of synch until uniting again in a triumphant tonal chord sequence.
Grace is my reflection on the passing nature of human memory, and how the perception of memories from the past change with time. This aspect interplays in the actual structure of the piece: the material in the middle-section of this movement is a subordinate “passing” material from the first movement, but here it is extended and developed. Grace is a harmonic and structural resolution of De-bug. Like DE-BUG (U(t)=C),GRACE (R(e)=D) uses the pitch content from the letters in the title of the movement. The combination of pitches results in the same chord with the exception of one pitch (B vs A). This change brings a harmonic resolution to the only semitone in the original chord, turning it into a completely pentatonic sonority.