Music for Traditional Korean Wind Instruments and Electronics (faculty composers). Premieres by UC Berkeley Professors Ken Ueno and Edmund Campion; UC Santa Cruz Professors Matt Schumaker and David Evan Jones; and Stanford Professor Jarosław Kapuściński.
 

Korean Experimental Music Festival 2025

Festival Overview
The National Gugak Center—Korea’s foremost institution for traditional music—joins forces with the Bay Area’s acclaimed Del Sol String Quartet to offer audiences a rare and resonant experience. The festival blends traditional Korean musical practices, Western classical instrumentation, and cutting-edge music technology in the world premieres of a dozen newly commissioned works by faculty and graduate-student composers from UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and Stanford. Two concerts feature a first-of-its-kind ensemble pairing two gayageum—Korea’s zither-like plucked instrument—with a Western string quartet. In two additional performances, traditional Korean wind instruments—the piri, saenghwang, and daegeum—are transformed through real-time computer sound processing into striking electroacoustic sound worlds. The festival culminates a two-year collaboration among the National Gugak Center, the UC Santa Cruz Music Department, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), and Stanford’s Department of Music and Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Don’t miss these concerts of new works shaped by deep intercultural dialogue and inspired by the enduring legacy of traditional Korean music.

CNMAT welcomes musicians from the National Gugak Center in Seoul, along with the Del Sol String Quartet, for a festival that blends traditional Korean instrumentalists with emerging technologies. Don’t miss these concerts of new works shaped by deep intercultural dialogue and inspired by the enduring legacy of traditional Korean music. Premieres by UC Berkeley faculty composers, Jean Ahn, Edmund Campion, Cindy Cox, Ken Ueno, and graduate composers Mat Muntz and Dion Nataraja, alongside works by UC Santa Cruz faculty composers, Matthew Schumaker, Ben Carson, and David Evan Jones with UC Santa Cruz graduate composers, as well as a new work by Stanford professor, Jarosław Kapuściński.  The KEMF was born from a two-year collaboration between UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley (CNMAT and the Department of Music), and  Stanford (CCRMA).