Mari Kimura

Biography

Mari Kimura is a violinist and composer who has taught at New York University and teaches a graduate class in computer music interactive performance at the Juilliard School. She studied violin in her native Japan, where her father is a professor of architecture and her mother a professor of law. She continued her violin studies at Boston University (1985-88). There, she first came into contact with electronic music, and from 1988, she continued her violin and computer study at the Juilliard School, earning a doctorate in violin performance. She has studied composition with Mario Davidovsky at Columbia University and computer music at Stanford. While at Juilliard, she discovered a novel bowing technique called ‘subharmonics,’ which extends the range of the violin down to one octave below the lowest fundamental note (open G string) without retuning the instrument. She has incorporated this technique in her own works for violin, and she has a growing list of technical publications on acoustics and violin and computer performance practice. She has just been awarded a grant from the American Composers Forum to complete a Violin Concerto, which will be premiered next year in Mexico.I spoke with Mari Kimura on September 26, 1998 (for no particular reason, George Gershwin’s hundredth birthday).

David Bundler

Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.