KRONOS FESTIVAL 2025 PERFORMER BIOS
Benedicte Maurseth
Benedicte Maurseth is a well-established and esteemed performer and composer on Norway’s music scene. She has studied with Hardanger fiddle master Knut Hamre for close to thirty years and is an alumna of the Ole Bull Academy. Maurseth has toured extensively as a soloist and in collaboration with others, both in Norway and internationally. She works closely with many of the leading artists across genres and artistic expressions such as Jon Fosse, Anne Marit Jacobsen, Rolf Lislevand, Mats Eilertsen, Berit Opheim, Merilyn Crispell, and more. Maurseth has written music for theater and film and other commissioned works for festivals and albums. The work Tidekverv, which was premiered in 2017, was awarded NOPA's music prize, and her song «Very Full», which was specially written for the TV series Loki (Marvel Studio), ranked high on the Billboard list.
Maurseth also received many prestigious artist grants from the Norwegian state for cultivating her tradition and creative work. She has recorded albums for Grappa Musikkforlag (Hubro & Heilo) and ECM Records, and has also published books, articles and essays. Her book To be nothing. Conversations with Knut Hamre, Hardanger Fiddle Master, was published at Terra Nova Press / MIT Press fall 2019. Her latest album Hárr was awarded «Best Nordic album of the year», and received the prestigious Nordic Music Prize for 2022. In 2022 she also released the book Systerspel (Fiddlesisters) about the history of female fiddle players in Norway from 1700 until today.
Laura Ortman
A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, MASS MoCA, MCA Chicago, REWIRE Festival at the Hague, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an allNative American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast.
Ortman is the recipient of the 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-inResidence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
San Francisco Girls Chorus
Under the direction of Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, the San Francisco Girls Chorus has achieved an incomparable sound that underscores the unique clarity and force of impeccably trained treble voices fused with expressiveness and drama. As a result, the Chorus vibrantly performs 1,000 years of choral masterworks from plainchant to the most challenging and nuanced contemporary works created expressly for them in programs that are as intelligently designed as they are enjoyable and revelatory to experience. Each year, hundreds of singers from across the Bay Area ranging in age from 4 - 18 participate in the SFGC’s programs. The organization consists of a professional-level performance, recording, and touring ensemble within a six-level Chorus School training program. A leading voice on the Bay Area and national music scenes, the Chorus, now in its 46th season, has produced award-winning concerts, recordings and tours, empowered young women in music and other fields, enhanced and expanded the field of music for treble voices and set the international standard for the highest level of performance and education.
Vân-Ánh Võ
A fearless musical explorer, Vân-Ánh Võ is an award-winning performer of the 16-string đàn tranh (zither) and an Emmy Award-winning composer who has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, and Yo-Yo Ma. In addition to her mastery of the đàn tranh, she also uses the monochord (đàn bầu), bamboo xylophone (đàn t’rung), traditional drums (trống) and many other instruments to create music that blends the wonderfully unique sounds of Vietnamese instruments with other genres, and fuses deeply rooted Vietnamese musical traditions with fresh new structures and compositions.
Coming from a family of musicians and beginning to study đàn tranh (16-string zither) from the age of four, Van-Anh graduated with distinction from the Vietnamese Academy of Music, where she later taught. In 1995, Vân-Ánh won the championship title in the Vietnam National Đàn Tranh Competition, along with the first prize for best solo performance of modern folk music. In Hanoi, Vân-Ánh was an ensemble member of Vietnam National Music Theatre as well as a member of the traditional music group Đồng Nội Ensemble, which she founded and directed. She has since performed in more than fourteen countries and recorded many broadcast programs in and outside of Vietnam.
Since settling in San Francisco’s Bay Area in 2001, Vân-Ánh has collaborated with musicians across different music genres to create new works, bringing Vietnamese traditional music to a wider audience. She has presented her music at Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center (2012, 2014, 2016), Lincoln Center, NPR, Houston Grand Opera, Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center, UK WOMAD Festival, and London Olympic Games 2012 Music Festival. Vân-Ánh has been a composer, collaborator and guest soloist with Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma, Southwest Chamber Music, Oakland Symphony, Monterey Symphony, Golden State Symphony, Apollo Chamber Players, Flyaway Productions for aerial dance works, Alonzo King LINES Ballet, jazz and rap artists, and other World Music artists. Additionally, she cocomposed and arranged the Oscar® nominated and Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner for Best Documentary, Daughter from Danang (2002), the Emmy® Award winning film and soundtrack for Bolinao 52 (2008), and “Best Documentary” and “Audience Favorite” winner, A Village Called Versailles (2009).
After taking on an integral role in Kronos Quartet’s theatrical production “All Clear” in 2012, Vân-Ánh premiered her first multi-media production as Artistic Director, composer, and performer with “Odyssey” at the Kennedy Center in 2016. Since then, she will be premiering “Songs of Strength” at Cal Performances, UC Berkeley in March 2021, and the first part of Mekong trilogy production, “Mekong: SOUL” commissioned by Kennedy Center in 2021.
Her productions are unique in that they often include a community component leading up to her performances, including community workshops that are meant to further engage participants in the topic that has inspired Vân-Ánh in the creation of these productions. Under President Obama's administration, Vân-Ánh was the first Vietnamese artist to perform at the White House and received the Artist Laureate Award for her community contributions through the arts. Vân-Ánh has also received project awards and support from Creative Work Fund, Center for Cultural Innovations, Alliance for California Traditional Arts, City of San Jose, New Music USA, Mid Atlantic Foundation, Chamber Music America (for residency work), Zellerbach Family Foundation, California Art Council, San Francisco Commissions, and the Haas Fund.
Soo Yeon Lyuh
Soo Yeon Lyuh is a composer, improviser, and master of the haegeum, a two-stringed Korean bowed instrument. Lyuh’s work strikes a balance between originality and tradition, borrowing and recontextualizing familiar gestures from Korean music. Her soundscape follows a logic of texture, pacing, feeling, and unexpected turns.
Lyuh asks classically trained performers to approach their instruments from an unusual perspective, drawing out fresh sounds that, once understood, sound organic. These sounds are deceptively difficult to specify with notation. Instead, Lyuh records herself playing the haegeum and teaches her music to performers by ear. A “score” will be both a printed page,
and a set of instructional videos. She asks performers and listeners alike to reimagine the sounds of a conventional Western ensemble.
Lyuh’s music addresses present social issues. “Tattoo” (2021) is about fear and release, and responds to her own experience of a random shooting incident in California. “See You On The Other Side” (2021) was composed in response to the growing death toll of the coronavirus. “Moment 2020” (2020) has been dedicated to artists who struggle to stay creative during the pandemic. Lyuh’s music searches for connection and empathy in tumultuous times.
As a performer, Lyuh possesses flawless technique and a full command of the haegeum’s traditional repertoire. For twelve years, she was a member of South Korea’s National Gugak Center, which traces its roots to the 7th Century Shilla Dynasty and is Korea’s foremost institution for the preservation of traditional music. Lyuh has endeavored to weave authentic styles into new musical domains, relocating in 2015 to the San Francisco Bay Area and drawing inspiration from its dynamic improvised music scene. In 2017, Lyuh was awarded a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council to develop collaborations with Bay Area experimental musicians. She pushes herself not only to command a deep understanding of historical works, but also to negotiate challenging new ones.
Through the Bay Area music scene, Lyuh met David Harrington, violinist of the Kronos Quartet. Harrington invited her to include “Yessori” (2017) in the Kronos’ project Fifty for the Future, which over five years commissioned fifty string quartets from prominent and emerging composers around the globe.
“There was no question that she was a phenomenal instrumentalist,” says David Harrington. “The sounds she is able to create on the haegeum are wholly unique and open up a vast new realm of sonic possibilities to Western ears. Moreover, the breadth of her knowledge of Korean traditional music is an incredible resource for musicians and scholars alike.”
Lyuh’s interest in improvisational music draws on Korean traditions lost to generations of performers. Although playing by ear is essential in bringing Korean folk music to life, preserving traditional performance has taken precedence over expanding the music’s improvisational vocabulary. In this respect Lyuh has ventured in a decidedly experimental direction. She was featured on the record Mudang Rock (2018) with drummer Simon Barker, guitarist Henry Kaiser, bassist Bill Laswell, and saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. In December 2017, she played with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith at the Create Festival in San Francisco. She also played on a free improvisation recording, Megasonic Chapel (Fractal Music, 2015), featuring Kaiser, percussionist William Winant, pianist Tania Chen, and cellist Danielle DeGruttola. Meanwhile, Lyuh honed her improvisational skills by working with cellist Joan Jeanrenaud and sitting in on courses of pianist Myra Melford and avant -garde icon Roscoe Mitchell.
In 2023, Lyuh has earned a M.F.A in composition at Princeton University and is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation. Previously, Lyuh earned her D.M.A. in Korean Traditional Music from Seoul National University. As a lecturer, she is sought after for her ability to impart valuable insight and intercultural understanding to those unfamiliar with Korean traditional music; her dissertation researched the changing role of haegeum in Korean orchestras beginning with early court traditions. As a visiting scholar at Mills College (20172018) and UC Berkeley (2015-2016), Lyuh taught established and emerging composers in the Bay Area about haegeum composition and techniques in order to create new repertoire for the instrument. Lyuh has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa (2011-2012).
“I think that it will be impossible to conquer the haegeum in my lifetime,” says Lyuh. “That is because it becomes harder the more I play it. The instrument continues to reveal itself. It is full of untapped possibilities for improvisation and composition. I hope the nature of my music can make a bridge between cultures across times, and break down any walls.”