My music is born out of the tension between tradition and experimentation. I explore the boundaries between sounds as a physical phenomenon and musical languages as a creative outcome that evolved via a lengthy, collective process within a specific culture.
Juri Seo is a composer and pianist whose music encompasses extreme contrast through unified, fluid, yet complex compositions. Juri merges many aspects of music from the past century—particularly its expanded timbral palette and unorthodox approach to structure—with a deep love of functional tonality, counterpoint, and classical form. With its fast-changing tempi and dynamics, her music explores the serious, humorous, lyrical, violent, tranquil, and obsessive.
Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship and Andrew Imbrie Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship, Copland House Residency Award, and Otto Eckstein Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center. She has received commissions from the Fromm Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and the Goethe-Institut. She has also been a composition fellow at prestigious festivals, including Tanglewood, Bang on a Can, SoundSCAPE, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her portrait albums “Mostly Piano” and “Respiri” were released by Innova Recordings.
Juri is an associate professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. Her recent work, “Toy Store,” combines a violin with electronic processing and field recordings to evoke the madness of childhood. An upcoming project for a quartet of flutes and percussion imagines animals’ perceptual world—the aural or tactile senses of birds, spiders and electric fish—to engage in the impossible task of exiting self-centered perception.
