Husband and wife duo Mark Tollefsen and Jae Won Kim will honor the works of Meredith Monk at UNC-Chapel Hill this Wednesday, Feb. 26. Their performance will be the first of three centered around Monk's work coming to Chapel Hill's campus in the next couple of weeks.
Tollefsen and Kim are both professors in UNC-Pembroke’s music department and will perform together on Chapel Hill's campus in Person Recital Hall at 7:30 pm.
They will be performing the complete works of Monk , a 20th-century classical composer and performer of both vocal and piano music. In 2015, Monk was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the highest honor in arts achievement in the United States, presented to her by President Barack Obama.
Allen Anderson, chair of the music department, said much of Monk's work is similar to minimalist composers from the late 20th century.
“From 1971 and the most recent from 2006, they are quiet and calm compositions," Anderson said. "She’s a minimalist composer, very similar to those of the '80s and '90s."
Anderson said Tollefsen and Kim’s performance will be the first of three concerts celebrating Monk's music.
“Each piece has a different feeling," Kim said. "They're mostly very peaceful and calm, but some of her music can be very tense. She's very rhythmic, and she uses a lot of repetition. I like all of her music, but my favorite is 'Ellis Island' because it was the first piece we learned together.”
Ellis Island is about the island in New York where immigrants came when they were disembarked, given new names and set out into the United States to start their new life, said Anderson.
“Monk is a groundbreaking composer," Tollefsen said. "Most people have probably never heard her piano music or her vocal music so we want to spark people's interest in her music in general before her concert in March. She's written about an hour's worth of piano music, and we enjoyed playing Ellis Island so much we decided to learn all of it.”
