Jerry Hui - The Meditation of Siddhartha

Biography

Jerry Hui

Jerry (Chiwei) Hui has written a wide variety of music that ranges from large-scale orchestral music to light-hearted choral text settings. His music has been performed in festivals such as the Music Today Festival in Eugene, Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium, Society of Composers conferences (regional and national), and the World Saxophone Congress. His choral piece Of Water & Love was awarded the 2008 Robert Helps Prize. The live premiere of his first comic chamber opera, Wired For Love, was well received by critics, who described the music as “seriously fun”, and with “accomplished contrapuntal texture.”

As a conductor, Dr. Hui has founded and directed various community choirs, church choirs, and orchestras. He was the founder, director and conductor of Eugene Contemporary Chamber Ensemble in Eugene, Oregon, focusing on contemporary music, with a repertoire that included works by Schoenberg, Webern, Adams, Stravinsky, as well as student composers. He had also conducted the Eugene Symphony Chorus and Madison Early Music Festival. In 2010, Mr. Hui founded and co-directs the ensemble New Music Everywhere, presenting contemporary music in venue-specific programs, funded by the Yamaha In-Residence Fellowship and the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission of Wisconsin. He is now the director of choral activities at University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Jerry Hui is active as a performer, primarily singing in small vocal ensembles and choruses, and has often appeared as a vocal soloist. Mr. Hui has sung Renaissance and contemporary music as a bass, tenor and countertenor, and is also interested in Renaissance dances and gestures. Past performances include Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno (Fileno) in the Bay Area, and Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King in Madison, Wisconsin. He is currently directing and performing with Eliza’s Toyes, a chamber ensemble in Madison specialized in creative and interdisciplinary performances of early music.

A native of Hong Kong, Jerry Hui received his DMA degree in music composition/choral conducting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Bachelor’s degree in music composition and computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his Masters degrees in music composition and choral conducting from the University of Oregon. Mr. Hui’s principal composition teachers include David Crumb, Stephen Dembski, Robert Kyr, Joel Naumann and Laura Schwendinger. His conducting teachers are Beverly Taylor, Sharon Paul, Bruce Gladstone, Hirvo Surva, and Paul Flight.

The Meditation of Siddhartha

(by the composer himself)

Siddhartha the young prince set out on a journey to knowing the world, and encountered the inevitable stages of life, all of which hidden from him since his birth: aging, sickness, and death. It was this encounter that set the prince onto his lifelong quest to the truth of life. In Meditation of Siddhartha, four musical ideas represent each of the steps that form the cycle of life. They intertwine and interact with each other, weaving together a tapestry of ethereal tones.