BAHLEST EEBLE readings FACULTY
2024
Cycle Seventeen: January - December, 2024
Violin and Harp
Jennifer Ellis, harp
Committed to shifting the boundaries of harp performance, Jennifer R. Ellis (D.M.A. University of Michigan, M.M. Cleveland Institute of Music, B.M. Oberlin) thoroughly enjoys taking the harp off its pedestal to use the instrument in new and unexpected ways. She embraces firsts. She has premiered over 100 works. She was the first harpist to be a U.S. State Department One Beat Fellow, the first harpist to teach at Nief Norf, the first musician to be named a University of Michigan Engaged Pedagogy Fellow, and the first harpist to attend Bang on a Can, Fresh Inc., and Splice summer festivals. A 2022 LABA Fellow and Alice Chalifoux Prize awardee, her love for innovative new music has led her to serve as a featured performer for the International Harp Festival, Festival of New American Music, Omaha Under the Radar, Sound of Late, Spitting Image Collective, Spark Festival, Piccolo Spoleto Festival and Kerrytown Edgefest. Her recordings run the gamut from premieres (Tides by Brian Baumbusch on Other Minds Records, Entertainment Tonight by Steve Horowitz, and multiple tracks by Roscoe Mitchell on Wide Hive Records) to solo improvisation (January Lullaby on Persist) to commissions for harp and saxophone (Launch with Jonathan Hulting-Cohen on Albany Records). Her scholarship examines new music and community engagement; she has written articles for Harp Column Magazine and The American Harp Journal, where she now serves on the editorial board. Her composition Dance was featured on Lyon and Healy’s Harptacular and her composition Glasswing was featured by the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project. Her commitment to teaching composers about the harp has led her to provide workshops for composers at over a dozen universities and summer programs. When not playing new music, she collaborates with her orchestral colleagues, performing with San Francisco Symphony, Oakland Symphony, Santa Cruz Symphony, and the Pacific Chamber Orchestra and has played concerti with ensembles including Colorado Chamber Orchestra, American Wind Symphony Orchestra, and Contra Costa Wind Symphony. In addition to serving as the American Harp Society Pacific Region Director, she teaches harp at Mills College and harp, pedagogy, and community engagement at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Hyeyung Sol Yoon, violin
Hyeyung Sol Yoon (she/her) is an artist at the margins of her American and Korean identities who plays the violin, composes, teaches, and organizes arts communities in a career that spans over 2 decades. Hyeyung’s experience of immigrating to the U.S. from Korea at the age of 7 and later traveling to her motherland to experience Korea’s shaman rituals and folk performances continue to inspire and inform her own creative work. Current projects include Uhmuhni, a collaboration between Yoon and Hanji artist Aimee Lee, telling the often unheard stories of Korean and Korean-American women. She joined the Del Sol Quartet in April 2023, an ensemble that has commissioned or premiered thousands of works by composers since 1992. In the 2022-2023 season, they performed the Angel Island Oratorio at the Singapore International Arts Festival and Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art; a work composed by Huang Ruo for string quartet and voices which was inspired by poetry engraved on the Angel Island Detention Center by Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century. Hyeyung was a violinist in the Chiara String Quartet for 18 years before celebrating the ensemble’s last season in 2018. The Chiara held residencies at Harvard University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, touring and performing many works by heart, including the complete string quartets of Béla Bartók at the Ravinia Festival in 2016.