Background
PhD, Harvard University
Coordinator, composition and music technology program. Jay Alan Yim has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, three individual composer's fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council (plus a fourth for collaborative digital art), and many other awards for his music, which has been featured at international festivals—Darmstadt, Tanglewood, Ars Musica, Wien-Modern, Sendai, Almeida, Gaudeamus, Huddersfield, ISCM—and performed by the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon, Nederlands Radio Filharmonisch, Residentie Orkest den Haag, Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group, Boston Musica Viva, Dal Niente, Endymion Ensemble, ICE, London Sinfonietta, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, Andiamo String Quartet, Arditti Quartet, JACK Quartet, Spektral Quartet, and soloists such as Frances-Marie Uitti, Gareth Davis, Ben Roidl-Ward, and Shanna Pranaitis, for whom he composed/designed/built a 25-minute performance installation for microtonal bass flute and The Contraption: a ten-channel live electronics processing system, running through 100 feet of flexible PVC hose. He has been privileged to work with Daniel Barenboim, Alan Gilbert, Oliver Knussen, James Avery, David Robertson, Ingo Metzmacher, James Wood, Lucas Vis, Stephen Mosko, Claire Heldrich, Marin Alsop, Ben Bolter, and Oliver Hagen. In 2016 he composed a work inspired by the color vision of bees, “Das Lila der Bienen” for an orchestra of 168 cellos; the premiere was conducted by Hans Jorgen Jensen. He lives and works in Amsterdam and Chicago, where he has been a member of Northwestern’s faculty since 1988. He co-founded the intermedia collaborative 'localStyle' with Marlena Novak, and their work has been exhibited internationally in more than fifty cities, in festivals, museums, galleries, alternative venues, and indoor and outdoor public spaces. Most recently their work “Choral” was presented on the 10,000 square meter façade of Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, with the soundtrack projected over the audio system on Chicago’s Riverwalk. Their projects focus on exploring the terrain of political and socioeconomic fracture, and addressing our relationship to nonhuman others, via themes such as climate change and resource extraction, the mating behavior of hermaphroditic marine flatworms, experimental blackbird grammar, the sonification of electric fish from the Amazon, and the choral singing of coral reefs. Since 2017 he has been a member of Deep Time Chicago.