Dialogues with Dominick: Creating New Music in the Midst of a Pandemic, Featuring Melissa Dunphy & Texu Kim

October 6, 2020

Mendelssohn Chorus is thrilled to announce that we have commissioned two incredible composers, Melissa Dunphy and Texu Kim, during our 20-21 season. Join us to hear how these two composers approached the task at hand and learn more about their music making processes.

Born to refugee parents and raised in Australia, Melissa Dunphy immigrated to the United States in 2003 and has since become an award-winning and acclaimed composer specializing in vocal, political, and theatrical music. She first came to national attention in 2009 when her large-scale choral work the Gonzales Cantata was featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, National Review, Comedy Central, and on Fox News and MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, where host Rachel Maddow described it as “the coolest thing you’ve ever seen on this show.” Dunphy has a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.M. in Theory and Composition from West Chester University, and is a lecturer in composition at Rutgers University.

Much of Texu Kim’s compositional outlook reflects his personal fascination with everyday experiences, as in his piece Bounce!!, inspired by bouncing basketballs and incorporates different aspects of bouncing through bouncy gestures and alternating chords and instruments. As a person with a multicultural background, he also composes music about modern Korea and the interaction between its folk culture and external influences, as in Monastic Sceneries which addresses the integration of American evangelical and indigenous shaman traditions in Korean Christianity. Texu teaches composition and music theory at San Diego State University, after teaching at Lewis & Clark College, Portland State University, and Syracuse University. He also served as the Composer-in-Residence of the Korean Symphony Orchestra in 2014-18. Having studied with Unsuk Chin, David Dzubay, Sven-David Sandstrom, Claude Baker, and Sangjick Jun, he received his D.M. from Indiana University and other degrees from Seoul National University.

October 28, 2020 - 7:30pm, tickets available on mcchorus.org