Goodbye NY: Music of Florence Price & Johannes Brahms (In-Person!)

Florence Price - Five Folksongs in Counterpoint
Johannes Brahms - String Sextet in Bb Major

BIOS:

Yoon Jung Hwang is an active freelancer from Korea. She started violin at the age of 4 and was admitted to Shenyang Conservatory of Music in China when she was 12 years old. During her time there she was awarded many scholarships for excelling academically and musically. After studying at the Shenyang Conservatory of Music, Yoon Jung was admitted to several colleges in the United States in 2014.

Yoon Jung decided to transfer to the Aaron Copland School of Music to study with Daniel Phillips, finishing her Bachelor’s degree there this year, she is the recipient of LeFrak Fund/Endowment Scholarship and Cantor S. Katz Scholarship Fund, and Benno and Evelyn Feldmann-Ansbacher Fund. She has had masterclasses with Yura Lee, Gregory Fulkerson, and Lewis Kaplan. In 2018 she worked at the New York Big Apple International Music Festival as assistant chamber coach and played at the Lake Tahoe Music Festival, and will joined the Chamber Music Center of New York as viola counselor in 2019. She will be starting at NYU for her master’s degree in Fall of 2021.

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Gabrielle Chou, 25, is a New York-based pianist and violinist seeking to defy genres and break barriers in music education and performance tradition. In her pursuit of artist-citizenship she performs solo, chamber music, and in large ensembles, teaches and lectures, coaches chamber music, collaborates with composers and dancers, and is active in community engagement. She studied at the Colburn Music Academy and received her B.M. and M.M. from The Juilliard School; currently she is a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. She studied piano with Jerome Lowenthal and Richard Goode, violin with Lewis Kaplan, and chamber music with Emmanuel Ax, Sylvia Rosenberg, and Timothy Eddy. Gabrielle currently serves as adjunct professor of music history at Baruch College as well as staff pianist at The Juilliard School and the Hoff-Barthelson Music School. She plays with the Grammy-nominated Metropolis Ensemble as well as the Miami-based Nu Deco Ensemble.

Gabrielle is the winner of the Center for Musical Excellence’s 2018 International Performing Arts Grant and has been a piano and violin soloist with orchestras and performed extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Asia. At Juilliard Gabrielle served as a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Fellow, and her community engagement collaborations include those with Para Los Niños, the Opportunity Music Project, the Omomuki Foundation, and the Music Academy of the West’s MERIT program. In addition, Gabrielle is an avid proponent of new music and contemporary collaborations, improvising, working, and performing with dancers, actors, and composers. In her free time she likes to frequent art museums and aquariums, play video games, and read science fiction.

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Violist Kayla Williams is an advocate for music, who hopes to diversify music through her own experiences as a Black woman. Originally from Florida, Kayla’s music endeavors began on the violin at age four, joining the Tallahassee Youth Orchestra soon after. It wasn’t until age ten that she discovered her true passion, the viola. As a winner of the 2018 Lynn Concerto Competition, she made her concerto debut performing Bartok’s Viola Concerto. Williams has been the guest of music festivals across a range of music genres including the Aspen Music Festival and School, Eastern Music Festival, and the Florida Folk Festival.

Williams earned a Bachelor of Music degree in Viola Performance from the Lynn Conservatory of Music in Boca Raton, Florida and a Master of Music degree in Viola Performance from the Juilliard School in New York City. She is also the recipient of the 2021 Juilliard Career Advancement Fellowship. Kayla believes music should be accessible to students of all backgrounds. She aspires to create a foundation of her own that will provide access and funding needed to support music programs in underrepresented communities.

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From Uniondale, New York, 23-year old first-generation Filipino-American Jay Julio (they/them) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer-arranger, and writer currently part of the 2020-2023 LA Orchestra Fellowship. Their recording credits include theatrical, pop, and lo-fi hip-hop work on Captured Tracks, Broadway, and United Common Records, and videos with Marcus Mumford and Major Lazer. Radio appearances include SiriusXM (Symphony Hall), IPR, 4MBS (Brisbane), and WKCR; TV appearances include ABC & NBC affiliates across the nation as part of a May 2021 special on the history of Asian and Pacific Islander communities inside the United States. Jay’s arrangements have been heard at the Cannes Film Festival, New York Fashion Week, and the NYC YoungArts Gala at the Met Museum.

They have attended Music Academy of the West, Orpheus@Mannes, and the Aspen, Spoleto and Pacific Music Festivals as a fellowship student, and has served on the substitute viola & chamber music faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, as a Teaching Fellow at the Juilliard School’s Music Advancement Program, and is returning for the fourth time this summer as a Teaching Assistant at Interlochen. Jay has been a prizewinner in national competitions held by the National Federation of Music Clubs, the Music Teachers National Association, and has received grants from the Juilliard School, the American Viola Society, and the Virtu Foundation to further their career. They were a recipient of a 2020 Music Academy of the West Fast Pitch Award and recognized as a 2021 WeInspire Foundation Ambassador for their musical-abolitionist organization Sound Off: Music for Bail, which recently received another grant from the Juilliard School for their first album.

After taking their first viola lesson at age 14 at the Mannes Preparatory Division, Jay graduated from the Interlochen Arts Academy at 16 studying with Renee Skerik with the school’s highest musical honor, the Young Artist Award. They received a BM in Viola Performance from the Manhattan School of Music and an MM at the Juilliard School on full-tuition scholarships under the tutelage of Karen Ritscher, Heidi Castleman, Misha Amory, and Matthew Lipman. Other important mentors include Anne Lanzilotti and Lina Bahn. For rhythm, Jay plays jazz and studies poetry.

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Described as “...demonstrating a facility with a multitude of musical languages” by British avant-garde music magazine The Wire, cellist Camille Dietrich enjoys a rising career as a soloist, chamber musician, and teacher in New York City.

Camille has a particular affinity for contemporary music, and has worked with various contemporary chamber groups. As an alumni of contemporary music education program Face the Music and the Face the Music Quartet, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, Symphony Space, the Baryshnikov Theater, (Le) Poisson Rouge, Roulette, and toured in Washington DC. Alongside the members of the Kronos Quartet, she performed the world premiere of Pelle Gudmundsen Holmgreen’s string quartet “All in One,” a piece commissioned by the Kronos Quartet. Camille has also performed and recorded Steve Reich’s “Triple Quartet” with the JACK Quartet, which was broadcasted on WQXR radio.

In 2017, Camille and her father, avant-garde saxophonist Don Dietrich released their duo album, DIETRICHS, on Pica Disk Records, which was reviewed in the November 2017 issue of The Wire. Camille and her father were also recognized in www.jazzrightnow.com's list of Best Live Concerts of 2018. Camille has premiered as a soloist with the North New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, the Rockland Symphony, and has performed solo recitals throughout NYC and the larger New York metropolitan area.
Camille currently teaches at DZ Strad Violin Shop and Music To Your Home, and actively freelances in the Tri-State Area. She completed her undergraduate degree at Manhattan School of Music studying cello performance and cello pedagogy with Marion Feldman. Camille received her Master of Music degree from Manhattan School of Music in 2020, where she studied with Julia Lichten and David Geber.

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A versatile player and musician, Sam is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Orin O’Brien and David Grossman. He recently completed his graduate studies at the Yale School of Music, with Don Palma. Sam is not only orchestrally trained, but is a skilled and sensitive small ensemble player. Contemporary music makes up a large part of Sam’s career, and he is dedicated to performing works by living composers, and creating a more inclusive environment in every musical context. Sam is co-founder and administrator for Bass Players for Black Composers, a collective of bassists, composers, and patrons devoted to expanding the solo bass repertoire with works by Black composers.

An avid chamber musician, Sam attended The Bowdoin Music Festival, Decoda Skidmore Chamber Music Institute, Texas Music Festival, the Lucerne Music Festival, and was accepted at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan in 2020 and 2021. Sam is part of the duo confluss, with Amber Evans, soprano: an up-and-coming chamber ensemble committed to the performance of repertoire for their instrumentation and blurring the lines between concert music, theatre, and performance art.

In March 2019, he served as Acting Associate Principal Bass for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, led by Mattias Pintscher, and recently returned to play with LACO accompanying his former teacher and soloist David Grossman, in the west coast premiere of Dark with Excessive Bright, by Missy Mazzoli in November 2019, led by Jaime Martín.

As an educator, Sam worked in the New Haven Public School System through the Music in Schools Initiative as part of the Yale School of Music, and is dedicated to providing equitable and comprehensive music education in the tristate area.

Sam is former principal bassist of the award-winning New York Youth Symphony and graduated from their composition program. As a composer, he has received the Ira Gershwin ASCAP award for his promise and talent as a composer, and will attend the Performer/Composer MM program at the New School this fall.