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).
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