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Juri Seo Associate Professor of Music; Director of Graduate Studies (Composition)

Juri Seo is a composer and pianist based in Princeton, New Jersey. She seeks to write music that encompasses extreme contrast through compositions that are unified and fluid, yet complex. She merges many of the fascinating aspects of music from the past century—in particular its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious and the humorous, the lyrical and the violent, the tranquil and the obsessive. She hopes to create music that loves, that makes a positive change in the world—however small—through the people who are willing to listen.

Her composition honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, a Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, Copland House Residency Award, and the Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood. She has received commissions from Fromm Foundation, Barlow Endowment, Tanglewood Music Center, the 21st Century Piano Commission Competition from the University of Illinois, and the Renée B. Fisher Piano Competition. Her debut album “Mostly Piano” was released by Innova Recordings in 2017. She holds a D.M.A. (Dissertation: Jonathan Harvey’s String Quartets, 2013) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she studied with Reynold Tharp. She has also attended the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Rome, corsi di perfezionamento with Ivan Fedele) and Yonsei University (Seoul, B.M.). Since 2009, she has been a composition fellow at the Tanglewood, Bang on a Can, and SoundSCAPE festivals, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is Associate Professor of Music at Princeton University. 

B.A. Yonsei University (Korea)

M.M., D.M.A University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Guggenheim Fellowship, 2016; Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013; Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship 2011; Otto Eckstein Fellowship from Tanglewood 2011

Courses

Juri Seo
216 Woolworth
(609) 258 - 4244
Website
My Work Focuses on

Contemporary Music Composition

My Other Interests Include

Piano literature, humor in music, Beethoven, tennis.

Related

Apr 8, 2019

Professor Juri Seo Receives Goethe Award

Jan 2, 2019

Composer Juri Seo’s Lost Songs Find Their Voices in Princeton

Dec 11, 2017

Barbara White and Juri Seo Receive Fromm Music Foundation Commissions
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