Melissa Hui facts for kids

Melissa Hui is a talented Chinese-Canadian composer and pianist. She was born in Hong Kong in 1966. Today, she lives in Montreal, Canada. Since 2010, she has been a professor at McGill University. Some of her famous musical pieces include and blue sparks burn (for violin and piano), Common Ground (for orchestra), and San Rocco (for oboe d'amore, choir, and chimes).

About Melissa Hui

Early Life and School

Melissa Hui was born in Hong Kong in 1966. When she was eight years old, in 1974, her family moved to Canada. She grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Melissa started her college studies at the University of British Columbia. She earned her first degree in piano performance. Later, she studied composition. She earned her master's degree from the California Institute of the Arts. She then got her doctorate from Yale University. Some of her important teachers were Jacob Druckman, Mel Powell, Martin Bresnick, Earl Kim, and Morton Subotnick.

Her Career

In 1993, Melissa Hui helped start a group called the Common Sense Composer's Collective. This group included a few composers and eleven musicians. They wanted to try new ways of creating and sharing music. The group worked with many other music ensembles over the years.

From 1994 to 2004, Melissa taught at Stanford University. After that, she moved back to Canada. In 2010, she became a professor at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Quebec. She still teaches there today.

Her Music

Melissa Hui has written many pieces for different groups of musicians. She has created lots of chamber music. This is music for a small group of instruments. She has also written orchestral works for large orchestras. Plus, she has composed choral pieces for choirs.

Some of her well-known orchestral works include Between You (1992), Common Ground (1993), and Aljira (1995). These pieces were asked for by big orchestras like the Vancouver, Winnipeg, and Oregon Symphonies.

Melissa has also written a few large choral pieces. These include San Rocco (1991), Night on Earth (2001), and Pax (2019). All these pieces use instruments along with the choir. They often feature SATB parts, which means Soprano, Alto, Tenor, and Bass voices.

One of her memorable chamber music pieces is and blue sparks burn (2002). It is written for violin and piano. Melissa wrote this piece after the sad events of September 11, 2001. She said it was her way of sharing her feelings about what happened.

Two other chamber works by Melissa Hui are Speaking in Tongues (1993) and Foreign Affairs (1994). Both of these pieces are special because they need a larger group of fifteen instruments.

Later, she wrote Lacrymosa (1996), which includes a soprano singer. In 1997, she created Woman: Songs on poems by Sandra Cisneros. This piece features a mezzo-soprano singer, flute, viola, and cello. As the title suggests, the music is set to poems by Sandra Cisneros. For example, the song "Loose Woman" was inspired by a dance scene from the musical “Sweet Charity”. Melissa wanted to create a strong feeling of femininity in this piece.

In 1998, Melissa Hui also wrote the music for a short film. The film was called "Sunrise Over Tiananmen Square". It was directed by Shui-Bo Wang and was even nominated for an Oscar!

List of Works