Short Bio
For use in concert programs and advertising copy.
John Seymour, who goes by the nickname “Chow,” recently earned his doctoral degree in music composition at the University of Hawai’i, where he also taught various music theory courses. He grew up in Michigan and went on to receive a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University (with a minor in Japanese Language and Culture) in Nashville, TN, where he studied with Dr. Michael Kurek and Dr. Michael Rose. He then completed his Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of North Texas College of Music, where he studied principally with Dr. Cindy McTee and also with Dr. Joseph Klein and Dr. Damián Keller. He writes as often for Asian instruments as for standard Western instruments, and has won awards from both Japan and Korea for his compositions. His Chamber Concerto in Sinawi-jo was selected as one winner of the 2010 National Gugak Center composition competition, sponsored by the South Korean Government, and his Namima (“On the Waves”) was given the top award at the 2017 Makino Yutaka Concours in Tokyo. Seymour also studies and performs on several Asian flutes, mainly the Chinese Dizi and Japanese Shinobue.
Academic Résumé
John Seymour’s professional, academic résumé, including a full list of compositions with dates and personnel of performances, is available as a .pdf here: 2018-03-07_j_seymour_resume.pdf
A version of the same résumé written in side-by-side Japanese and English is also available as a .pdf: 2018-03-07_J_Seymour_EN-JP_Resume.pdf
These documents were last updated: February, 2018.
Long Bio
Written in a casual tone, good for articles and other write-ups.
John Seymour recently earned his doctoral degree in music composition at the University of Hawai’i, where he also taught various music theory courses. He grew up in Michigan and went on to receive a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Theory from the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University (with a minor in Japanese Language and Culture) in Nashville, TN, where he studied with Dr. Michael Kurek and Dr. Michael Rose. He then completed his Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of North Texas College of Music, where he studied principally with Dr. Cindy McTee and also with Dr. Joseph Klein and Dr. Damián Keller. He writes as often for Asian instruments as for standard Western instruments, and has won awards from both Japan and Korea for his compositions. Seymour also studies and performs on several Asian flutes, mainly the Chinese Dizi and Japanese Shinobue.
Seymour, known by his nickname “Chow” among musicians, has a wide variety of compositional interests and works in many compositional idioms; as is not uncommon in the early 21st century. Strongest among these is an interest in music from other cultures, especially as an inspiration for composition, but also as a field for research.
“Studying the musics of the world to understand and appreciate them has not only had an effect on my compositions for Western instruments, but has also opened up the world of composing art music for the traditional instruments of cultures outside the Western sphere. It turns out that the performers of new music for instruments from places like Japan, Korea, China, and Indonesia are looking for composers who have an appreciation for the traditional genres from which these instruments came, even when composing new avant-garde music.”
Indeed Seymour’s works for East Asian instruments have won praise from professional performers of new music for those instruments. His Chamber Concerto in Sinawi-jo for an ensemble of Korean instruments was selected as one winner of the 2010 National Gugak Center composition competition, sponsored by the South Korean Government; Seymour is the first person not of Korean ethnicity to win this award. His quartet for Japanese instruments, Namima (“On the Waves”) was given the top award at the 2017 Makino Yutaka Concours in Tokyo (named for the late avant-garde composer MAKINO Yutaka). His solo works for the gayageum, a Korean plucked string instrument, are performed often by gayageum virtuoso Baek Seung-Hee, who has also commissioned several works from Seymour.
However, Seymour feels that studying non-Western genres along with the Western canon has opened up a wider palette of techniques to explore when composing even for standard Western orchestral instruments. To this end, for example, Seymour’s MM Thesis was a chamber composition for Western instruments that employed certain organizational techniques found in similar repertories from all over Southeast Asia. The cultures studied all use varying tunings, scales, melodies, rhythms and timbres, and Seymour’s work did not borrow any of these surface elements. Only the deeper, structural tendencies, which were similar in all of the SE Asian genres studied, were also borrowed for Seymour’s composition. In this way, Asian compositional techniques were explored even in a piece for Western instruments that is not “about” Asia or its culture.
Seymour has composed in both avant-garde and neo-tonal styles but, like a lot of early 21st Century composers, would prefer to move on from that dichotomy. “One key to doing that,” he claims, “is to explore how musical elements like melody and periodic rhythm can allow us to structure our compositions in ways that are not mere throw-backs to the common practice era.” A number of his works explore novel formal arrangements; each movement of Square Pegs, for example, is in two halves that contrast in a single, noticeable but subtle way. The Divertimento for Oboe and Piano, meanwhile, is structured around varying approaches to fully chromatic melody writing (none of which are serial or procedurally based.)
Having just earned his Ph.D., Seymour is currently applying for academic positions. Almost all of his music can be heard on his website, for no fee.