Ken Ueno

Ken Ueno (born January 11, 1970 in Bronxville, New York) is an American composer.
Career.
He studied at the United States Military Academy. He graduated from Berklee College of Music with a B.M. in Film Scoring/Composition "Summa Cum Laude", from Boston University with a M.M., from Yale School of Music with a M.M.A., and from Harvard University with a PhD.
He taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-director of Minimum Security Composers Collective.
Works.
He has composed orchestral works, for jazz big band and woodwind quintet, and two dance pieces for the Boston Conservatory.
He performed at the Flea, New York City.
Ueno has collaborated with violist Kim Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky on the works "Hypnomelodiamachia" for viola, percussion, and electronics (2007), and "Two Hands", a Kashkashian commission, for viola and percussion (2009). A monograph compact disc of three works for soloist(s) and orchestra, "Talus" for viola and orchestra, "On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis" for solo throat-singer and orchestra, and "Kaze-no-Oka" for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra, was released by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in 2010. Ueno has also written for such ensembles as the So Percussion Group, Bang on a Can All-Stars, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Del Sol String Quartet, Prism Quartet, and eighth blackbird.
Ueno's compositional approach frequently involves extra-musical modeling, including using images, cultural phenomena, or architecture as the basis for structural decisions, somewhat analogous to the use of architectural proportions in Renaissance music. "Kaze-no-Oka", for example, reflects in part the structure of the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki's like-named project. His "Talus" is, in a manner of speaking, a biography of a traumatic event in the life of its soloist, violist Wendy Richman, who shattered her ankle in a ten-foot fall. He is keenly interested in the process of exploring unique, in some sense irreproducible, sonic events linked to the performers for which his music is written.
As a performer, Ueno is active as a throat-singing vocalist and performing with live electronics. He is an accomplished guitarist.
In 2010, he was awarded the Berlin Prize residential fellowship in Music Composition at the American Academy in Berlin.