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Abstract/Description of Talk
This colloquium traces Ken Ueno’s performance-centered compositional practice as a continuous field that moves structurally and perceptually between geno-song and pheno-song, between noise and language-like sound, and between live embodiment and machinic inscription.
Beginning with his extended vocal work and moving through his recorder concerto Transcription is an Act of Empathy, Ueno discusses how composition becomes a form of embodied translation—an empathic inhabitation of another instrument, body, or technique. He introduces the idea of the performative exclave: structures that leak beyond the boundary of a single piece, reimagining what a movement can be through viral ritornellos that operate across an entire concert evening rather than inside a single score.
The talk then expands into his recent installation practice, focusing on Roomba Calligraphy and its antechamber The Last Song of the Anthropocene. Here, automated machines inscribe and erase graphite landscapes while spatialized microtonal sound drifts through the room, transforming cleaning into writing and performance into a field of machinic choreography. Human voice, circular breathing, and difference tones thread through this automated garden, dissolving the boundary between performer and mechanism into a shared field of rhythm, inscription, and erasure.
Together, these works articulate a compositional practice where performance, installation, and concert form are no longer separate domains, but a single traversable architecture of sound, body, and machine.
Bio
A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno (上野ケン / 上野健), 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](https://kenueno.com/Orchestral), 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](https://kenueno.com/Chamber), 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.