New Music Festival March 22-25

Four free evening concerts showcasing new musical compositions from around the world will be offered to the public during the third annual School of Music New Music Festival, March 22 to 25, at Illinois State University. All the concerts, celebrating Asia's music and composers, are free and will take place in Kemp Recital Hall.

Among the artists scheduled are the Vancouver-based Orchid Ensemble, a trio of Chinese, Taiwanese and Canadian musicians turning the traditions of the Pacific Rim into elegant, intercultural chamber music by challenging the ancient instruments and classical canons of East and West. Asian instruments such as the tabla, erhu and zheng will be heard.

The Orchid Ensemble, which includes Haiqiong Deng, Lan Tung and Jonathan Bernard, will perform at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 23. They will present a pre-concert talk at 7:20 discussing ancient musical instruments and traditions from China.

Opening the festival on Monday, March 22, will be the Vandana Duo, featuring ISU's professor Bill Koehler playing bass and Peoria musician Manpreet Bedi, a tabla player. They will discuss the tabla and improvisation at the 7:20 pre-concert talk and at 8 p.m. will present their original music.

Ohio State faculty violinist Kia-Hui Tan will present a concert of unaccompanied violin works by Asian and Australian composers at 8 p.m. Wednesday, March 24. Tan has performed as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber musician on five continents. An advocate of new music, Tan has performed music by 40 living composers and premiered more than two dozen solo and chamber works.

At 11 a.m. Wednesday, she and faculty from ISU's School of Music will present a quartete reading session with ISU composition students.

Closing the festival on March 25 will be an 8 p.m. concert by ISU faculty and friends including saxophonist Masahito Sugihara, a faculty member at both Northwestern University and Roosevelt University. The program will include composers from Japana, India, China and Korea performed by Illinois State University's Concert Choir. Instrumentalists will include Andrea Steele, Tuyen Tonnu, Paul Nolen and Kate Lewis.

A 2 p.m. presentation on Thursday will be by composer, organist, painter and visual artist Kyong Mee Choi, a faculty member at Roosevelt University. She will speak in room 229 of Centennial East. A doctor of musical arts graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Choi is a much-honored artist, with awards from groups in the U.S., Brazil, the Czech Republic, France and Italy.