| Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong and raised in Vancouver, British Columbia. After an undergraduate degree in piano performance, she received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate from Yale University in music composition. Her mentors include Jacob Druckman, Earl Kim, and Mel Powell.
Poetry is held in the highest esteem in Chinese literature. The Chinese delight in, above all, succinctness that alludes to an ephemeral wisdom. There are four-syllable Chinese proverbs in which the meanings of each word are successively juxtaposed with the next until a complex, exponential web of associations is derived from an initially simple construction. This is the cultural origin for the non-teleological processes that pervade Melissa’s music. It is this preference for the implicit over the explicit, for non-linear juxtapositions over narratives, and for simple eloquence that informs her aesthetic sensibility.
Her commissions include works for the Oregon, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo, and National Arts Centre orchestras; Ensemble Antipodes (Switzerland), New Millennium Ensemble (NYC), and the St. Lawrence String Quartet; numerous works for soloists, chamber, and choral ensembles; a soundtrack for the Academy Award-nominated NFB film, Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square; and an opera, Pimooteewin (The Journey), based on a Cree myth and sung in the aboriginal language. Significant performances include those by the Esprit Orchestra (Toronto), American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, International Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam), ISCM Festivals in Croatia and Switzerland, Théâtre de la Ville (Paris), Spoleto Festival, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. She has been the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim and Fromm Foundations, among others.
Melissa is a founding member of the Common Sense Composers Collective, whose mission involves the creation of new works in collaborative ventures with performing ensembles. Recordings of her works have been released on CRI, UMMUS, Santa Fe New Music, Nisapa and Centredisc, which released a CD of her solo and chamber works in 2006. Now living in Montreal, she was on the composition faculty at Stanford University in California from 1994 through 2004 and has held guest professorships at the California Institute of the Arts and at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
A note from the composer
Initially inspired by the haunting music of the African pygmies and Japanese gagaku court orchestra, I have strived to create a personal music of ethereal beauty, intimate lyricism, and raucous violence. I seek to compose works with honesty, often of simple intimacy, that speaks to the heart.
Trace presents the evolution of two musical materials in each of the instruments within a suspended space, or “ma.” This Japanese sense of space and silence is as integral to the music as the events that envelope it. |
