NIU presents new music for piano concert

Submitted by NIU

The Northern Illinois University School of Music has announced a concert of new music for piano featuring NIU alum Mabel Kwan. The concert will take place at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11, in the Music Building Recital Hall, 300 Lucinda Ave. on the NIU campus in DeKalb. There is no charge for admission.

The program will feature solo piano compositions, some with electronics, written within the last three years by composers currently in their 20s or 30s. Included is the world premiere of a new work by NIU alum Matthew Dotson, as well as another recent work by NIU alum Daniel Houglum. Works by Marcos Balter, Pablo Chin, Ramteen Sazegari, John Supko, and Lee Weisert also will be heard.

Kwan champions the works of artists from her generation and has been a featured performer at the Sonic Fusion Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, SEAMUS, Intermedia Festival at IUPUI, Experimental Piano Series at Pianoforte, and Chicago's Looptopia with Liminal Group. As a member of Ensemble Dal Niente, she is active in performances and education outreach throughout the concert season. She has been featured on WFMT as a soloist within the group, and performed with Dal Niente at the 45th International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, Germany where they received a Kranichstein Stipend Prize, the first awarded to an ensemble. Along with NIU alumni and percussionist Andrew Bliss, she is a founding member of the duo Nothing in Common which exists to explore and expand repertoire for piano and percussion. Born and raised in Austin, Texas, Kwan received performance degrees from Rice University and Northern Illinois University. She currently resides in Chicago.

For more information, contact Lynn Slater in the NIU School of Music at lslater@niu.edu or (815) 753-1546.