主講人: Ken Ueno 上野健
日期:2026.10.19
時間:13:30~15:10
地點:北藝大音樂一館M102教室
※北藝大作曲組必到
※歡迎有興趣者到場聆聽
簡多利
Jiujiu Peaks: for 8 musicians
楊博翔
Limen: for 6 musicians, electronics and video
李之堯
Distant Song: for string quartet
李翰威
Calligraphic Dance: for orchestra
A Rome Prize and Berlin Prize recipient, Ken Ueno (上野ケン / 上野健) is a composer, performer, sound artist, and scholar whose music is championed by leading performers and ensembles worldwide. His Shiroi Ishi, written for the Hilliard Ensemble, remained in their repertoire for over a decade, while Pharmakon was toured internationally by Eighth Blackbird for several seasons. In 2011, MaerzMusik presented a portrait concert of his work. In 2024, he was a featured guest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival, where the Arditti String Quartet premiered his latest string quartet and Tosiya Suzuki premiered his chamber concerto for bass recorder. In 2026, he returned to MaerzMusik with Cybernetic Entanglements, a new work created with Viola Yip.
As a vocalist, Ueno is known for pioneering extended vocal techniques and for transforming the megaphone into a musical instrument. He has performed his vocal concerto with major orchestras including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Warsaw Philharmonic, Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, and Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra. His collaborators include Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ikue Mori, Du Yun, DJ Sniff, Rebecca Lloyd-Jones, Karen Yu, and Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa.
Ueno’s sound installations have been exhibited internationally, including at MUAC (Mexico City), the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the Telfair Museum. Daedalus Drones, an immersive fence-labyrinth animated by flying drones, premiered in Hong Kong in 2021. In 2025, C-LAB (Taipei) presented Roomba Calligraphy, in which robotic vacuums fitted with custom 3D-printed speaker holders brush graphite dust across platforms while spatializing microtonal difference tones.
A Professor of Music at UC Berkeley, Ueno is also an active scholar and writer. His work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook, The New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, The Drama Review (TDR), and Wiley. He co-edited East Asian Voices of Resistance Against Racism in Music and recently guest-edited Sonic Ideas, the journal of the Mexican Center for Music and Sound Arts (CMMAS), for a special issue devoted to AI and music. His 2026 essay “Art Beyond the AI Dataset: A Manifesto for Staying Weird” appeared in Positionen and Music & Fashion: Fashion & Music.
Recent recordings reflect the breadth of Ueno’s practice. His monograph Wavelengths was released by New Focus Recordings in January 2026, bringing together four works exploring percussion, extended voice, microtonality, psychoacoustics, and the transformation of noise into pitch. In 2026, Blue Tapes released blue fifty-eight / Earth Song, his collaboration with Wukir Suryadi of Senyawa. Recorded above Salatiga, Central Java, the album brings Ueno’s extended voice into dialogue with Suryadi’s handmade Garu instruments, constructed from abandoned agricultural plows, with the surrounding environmental sounds becoming integral to the music. Earlier monograph recordings include Talus on BMOP/sound, a collection of three orchestral concertos.