9th Annual Sejong Music Competition Winners Concert
Tae-Pyung-Ga by Eun Young Lee
Amber Scherer, piano
(Piano Senior division Second Place
and
Best Interpretation of Korean piece Award
12/2/2012)
Quicktime movie Format
video length 2 min 57 sec
Claudia Cassidy Theather, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL USA
Jan 6, 2013
Amber Scherer, age 15, is a sophomore at New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL. She has been playing the piano for seven years and currently studies with Sueanne Metz. Some prizes that Amber received during the past few years include first place in the 2011 Walgreens Concerto Competition and both the senior solo and senior duet divisions of the Illinois State Music Teachers' Association competition. She has won a number of other competitions held at universities in Missouri, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Although on a more local scale, Amber's personal favorite performance was her solo debut with the Harper College Symphony Orchestra, which was a result of winning the 2011 Emilio Del Rosario Competition. Amber has also performed in masterclasses for Menahem Pressler, Sara Beuchner, Gabrielle Baldocci, and Robert Shannon. During the school year, Amber participates in a piano trio as a member of Midwest Young Artists' intensive chamber program.
She enjoys working with other high school musicians, especially after attending summer programs held at Indiana University, the University of Kansas, and the Music Institute of Chicago. Some secondary instruments that Amber studies include the violin, organ, and harpsichord. She plays these in various school orchestras.
utside of music, Amber loves learning about psychology, chemistry, and philosophy.
Currently Ms. Lee is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, where she is a recipient of the Lowell C. Wadmond Award, Doolittle Harrison Fellowship and Humanities Grant. Her current teachers include Shulamit Ran, Marta Ptaszynska, Jan Radzynski, Bernard Rands, Howard Sandroff, and Kotoka Suzuki. Ms. Lee has won multiple awards for her music, including first prize for the Tsang-Houei Hsu International Music Composition Award; the 2008 Max Di Julio Prize at the Nevada Encounters of New Music (N.E.O.N.) Festival; Honorable Mention in Great Wall International Competition; the first regional award in the SCI/ASCAP student composition commission (2006, 2009, 2010). Additionally, she was a recipient of the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships, and the Gerald Oshita Memorial Fellowship for the 2010 Djerassi Resident Artist Program. Her music has been heard through Art of the States, EBU (European Broadcasting Union), and KBS (Korean Broadcasting System) programes, and is featured in the SCI Journal of Music Scores (Vol. 41) as well as CD series (No.23). Prominent ensembles including the New York New Music Ensemble, eighth blackbird, Pacifica String Quartet, ALEA III, North/South Consonance Ensemble, Timetable Percussion, and Geum-Pa Flute Ensemble have performed her music. Her instrumental pieces, multimedia pieces, computer music, and film scores were featured in festivals and concerts in many countries, including June in Buffalo, SCI Conference, SCI National Conference, MGMC, Czech-America Institute in Prague, Korean Music Expo, 60X60 Project Vox Novus, Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, Gene Siskel Film Center, Pinocoteca do estado de Sao Paulo in Brazil, and Music09 in Switzerland. In 2008 she participated in the Atlantic Center for the Arts as an Associate Artist-in-Residence to Master Artist Augusta Read Thomas. |
A native of Korea, Eun Young Lee graduated from Ewha Women’s University with undergraduate and graduate degrees in Music Theory. After teaching music in universities across Korea, she moved to the United States in 1999, where she did graduate studies with David Noon at the Manhattan School of Music. The lyrics of Tae-Pyung-Ga expresses the effort to overcome mundane anguish by singing joyful tunes. This work was completed at MacDowell Colony in May 2010.