Dr. Corey Hamm, B.Mus. (Alta.), M.Mus., D.M.A. (Minn.)
Assistant Professor, Piano and Chamber Music
Director UBC Contemporary Players

Office: 604.822.3522, Room 307
Email: corey.hamm(at)ubc.ca

Corey Hamm, pianist

Dr. Corey Hamm is both an internationally performing pianist and Assistant Professor of Piano and Chamber Music at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. He is Director of the UBC Contemporary Players and joined the faculty of UBC in Fall 2005.

Dr. Hamm is honoured to be nominated for and winner of the 2008/2009 UBC Killam Teaching Award for Excellence in Teaching.

In June 2009 Dr. Hamm will be on the Piano Faculty of The Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP) at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Highlights of Dr. Hamm’s busy 2008 and 2009 concert seasons include international tours with over twenty performances of Frederic Rzewski's hour-long piano masterpiece, The People United Will Never Be Defeated! His performances (with associated lectures and master classes) have taken place in such cities as Hong Kong (5), Singapore, Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Edmonton, Camrose, Brandon, Winnipeg, Guelph, London, Toronto, Montreal, Seattle, Bellingham, Pullman, and Minneapolis, with more performances to come.

"Corey Hamm's performance [of the Rzewski] on Sunday afternoon was a superb one, technically very fine but also emotionally committed; it held the audience transfixed for its duration" - Deryk Barker, Music in Victoria.

"Endurance, stamina and living the moment on the edge rather than absolute digital accuracy characterised Hamm's take [of the Rzewski]. The ebbs and flows of the music were very well judged... Through all of this, Hamm captured its improvisatory and free-ranging spirit with aplomb... There were missed and fluffed notes at the heat of the moment, but he was mostly accurate, leaping over each thorny thicket with great courage and conviction. He really believes in this music."  - Chang Tou Liang, The Straits Times, Singapore

In recent seasons, Hamm has given many new music performances (including numerous World, Canadian and Vancouver Premieres) of works by György Ligeti, György Kurtag, Salvatore, Sciarrino, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Pierre Jodlowski, Chris Paul Harman, David Rakowski, Michael Tenzer, Nikolai Kapustin, Jerome Blais, Kaija Saariaho, Per Norgaard, Marco Stroppa, Elliott Carter, Marc Mellits, Ali Askin, Somei Satoh, Gerard Grisey,  Ronn Yedidia, Dorothy Chang, Michel Gonneville, Howard Bashaw, Franco Donatoni, Frederic Rzewski, Toshio Hosokawa, among many others.

The 2010/11 season will feature Hamm in the Vancouver premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra,  Gyorgy Ligeti's Piano Concerto and Gyorgy Kurtag's ...quasi una fantasia... with Vancouver New Music. In addition, Hamm will perform Ravel's Piano Concerto for The Left Hand, and recitals of works by Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Babadjanian, and Kapustin.

Hamm has been involved in the commissioning of over sixty solo, chamber and concerto works. Hamm's performances as soloist and chamber musician have been broadcast on CBC Radio, NPR and Polish Radio in Canada, the USA, and Europe. He has performed with the Vancouver Symphony, Lethbridge Symphony, Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and The Symphonic Wind Ensemble of the University of Minnesota.

Hamm is pianist with the prominent new music ensemble The Nu:BC Collective. With Nu:BC ("a delightfully diverse evening of sights and sounds" - Georgia Straight) he has performed multimedia concerts of works by Gyorgy Ligeti (danced and choreographed by Emily Molnar "a dazzling performance of five excerpts from Gyorgy Ligeti's lengthy Etudes for piano" - Georgia Straight); Howard Bashaw ("Hamm was easily the most impressive member of a well-rehearsed and disciplined band" - Georgia Straight); George Crumb ("navigated the subaqueous atmospheres of George Crumb's Vox Balaenae with ease" - Georgia Straight); Gyorgy Kurtag, John Adams, Michel Gonneville, Chris Paul Harman, Nikolai Kapustin, Steve Mackey, Bright Sheng, Frederic Rzewski, Chen Yi, Dorothy Chang, Lee Hoiby, and many others. The Nu:BC Collective is proud to have been a part of Vancouver Pro Musica’s Sonic Boom new music festival for the last three years, premiering dozens of works by Vancouver composers. Nu:BC's 2009/2010 season includes works by Somei Satoh, Gerard Grisey, Pierre Jodlowski, Phillippe Leroux, Chris Sivak, Kamran Ince, Dorothy Chang, Toshio Hosokawa, Elliott Carter, Bruce Hamilton, Jocelyn Morlock, Derek Bermel, Salvatore Sciarrino, and Marc Mellits. In 2010 the Nu:BC Collective will also be involved in an exciting collaboration with the BC Chinese Music Ensemble involving new works for both Chinese and Western instruments.

Hamm is also a founding member of the Canadian two-piano, two-percussion ensemble Hammerhead Consort, formed in 1990, and winners of such important Canadian awards as the Sir Ernest Macmillan Memorial Foundation Chamber Music Award (1992), and the CIBC National Music Competition (1991), as well as the 1993 ARIA Award for Best Classical Recording. Their second CD, Traffic, was released on Arktos Recordings in 1999. Hammerhead Consort performed in a live broadcast from the prestigious Witold Lutoslawski Studio in Warsaw while on tour in Poland in June 2000 (under the auspices of both The Canada Council and Polish Radio), and garnered rave reviews at the 2000 Winnipeg New Music Festival. With Hammerhead, Hamm has given over forty performances of Bartok's masterpiece, Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, plus performances of works by Rzewski, Kapustin, Helweg, and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, as well as over forty works written for the Consort by such noted Canadian composers as Malcolm Forsyth, James Harley, Howard Bashaw, David R. Scott, Sean Ferguson, among others. CBC Radio recorded Hammerhead in premieres of works by Hamel, Helweg and Godin at the opening concert of New Music Concerts 2004-2005 season in Toronto. The Consort premiered Howard Bashaw's Concerto for Two Pianos and Two Percussion with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra in March 2000.

In June 2006 Hamm was pianist for an exciting month long project in Bali combining a small western septet from Vancouver with a Balinese Gamelan in a new work by composer, performer and ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer. Red Letter Films made the documentary Bali by Heart about this fascinating project (available on amazon.com.)

"Pianist Hamm's Gift Unlocks Mysteries of Music," the Halifax Chronicle Herald wrote of Corey Hamm's solo concert tour promoted by the Debut Atlantic organization. Other tours of Canada have been sponsored by the Debut Incorporated series in Montreal and the Debut series at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Corey Hamm won first prize in the 2004 Elinor Bell Piano Fellowship Competition in Minnesota, was a semi-finalist in the 5th Orleans International Contemporary Piano Competition in Orleans, France 2002, and was the second prizewinner at the 1995 Eckhardt-Gramatte Competition for Contemporary Piano Music.

TEACHERS

Corey Hamm's beloved teachers include pianists Dr. Stephane Lemelin, Dr. Ernesto Lejano, Thelma Johannes O'Neill, and Marek Jablonski, and he completed his Doctoral degree (Dissertation: György Ligeti's Piano Etudes: A Performer's Analysis) at the University of Minnesota in 2005 with Distinguished McKnight Professor Lydia Artymiw. He has performed in masterclasses for György Kurtag, Henri Dutilleux, Roger Muraro, Dominique Merlet, Paul Badura-Skoda, Eugene Istomin, Roger Woodward, Detlef Kraus, Hans Leygraf, Tatiana Nikolaeva, Gyorgy Sebok, Angela Cheng, Boris Berman, David Lively, Catherine Vickers, Noel Lee, Genevieve Joy, and Howard Shelley. Two consecutive scholarships from the Johann Strauss Foundation have taken Hamm to the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria for summer study with Claude Helffer, Sergio Perticaroli and Karl-Heinz Kammerling. During the summers of 1993 and 1994, Hamm studied in the French Piano Institute at the Ecole Normale in Paris where he was awarded a special prize for Excellence in Performance. There, he had the opportunity to perform the complete piano works of Henri Dutilleux for the composer himself and his wife, pianist Genevieve Joy. He was on the piano faculty of the Alberta College Conservatory of Music in Edmonton from 1994 to 2001, and is a frequent adjudicator in Canada, Asia, and the USA.

TEACHING

Dr. Hamm has been very excited at the success of his students' class concerts. Every year his UBC piano students have put on three or four concerts in which ALL of Dr. Hamm's students perform.

PIANO CLASS CONCERTS:

Piano students of Dr. Corey Hamm

Mar. 27, 2010 - Own Choice: ???

Feb. 5, 2010 - Preludes, Etudes and Fugues: Bach, Hamelin, Shostakovich, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Scriabin, Ligeti,

Nov. 27, 2009 - Ancient Music from the Twentieth Century: Works by Ligeti - Etude No. 6 "Automne a Varsovie", Molina - Klngtang, Hamelin - Prelude and Fugue, Rakowski - Absofunkinlutely, Kapustin - Etude No. 3, Moto Perpetuo, Shostakovich - Prelude and Fugue, Alexina Louie - Fast Forward, Rzewski - Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, Schoenberg - Six Short Pieces Op. 19, Webern - Variations Op. 27, Finnissy - Strauss Waltzes.

Oct. 31, 2009 - Halloween Concert: Scary Piano Music: Works: Ligeti - Etude No. 13 "L'escalier du Diable",  Jodlowski - Serie Noire (piano/CD), Schumann - Der Dichter Spricht, Prokofiev - Suggestion Diabolique Op. 4, Rachmaninoff - Preludes Op. 23 Nos. 5, 7, Op. 2 No. 3, Etude-Tableau Op. 39 No. 6, Moszkowski - Etincelles,Liszt - Nuages Gris,

Apr. 3, 2009 - Own Choice: Beethoven - Sonata Op. 31/2 (mvt 1), Schumann-Liszt - Widmung, Schubert - Sonata a (mvt 1), Chopin - Scherzo No. 1, Brahms - Vars. on an Orig. Theme, Op. 21/1, Liapunov - Reverie du soir, Op. 3, Liszt - Mephisto Waltz No.1,

Nov. 21, 2008 - Ancient Music from the Twentieth Century: Dutilleux - Choral et variations, Louie - Memories from an Ancient Garden, Kapustin - Etude No. 1, Preludes Nos. 5, 9, Coulthard - Valley of the Butterflies, Piazzolla - Adios Nonino, Bolcom - Graceful Ghost Rag, Antheil - Jazz Sonata, Fekri - Improvisation, Jared Miller - Butterflies, Jacob ter Veldhuis - The Body of Your Dreams, Messiaen - La premiere communion de la Vierge,

Oct. 30, 2008 Halloween Concert: Scary Piano Music: Ravel - Ondine, Scriabin - Poeme Satanique, Op. , Liszt - Totentanz (solo arr. Liszt), Liszt - Mephisto Waltz No. 1, Prokofiev - Suggestion diabolique, Op. 4, Holst - Mars, The Bringer of War (arr. 2 pnos Holst), Saint-Saens - Danse macabre (arr. 2 pnos/8hds), Debussy - Des pas sur la neige, MacDowell - Hexentanz, Griffes - Nightfall,

UBC CONTEMPORARY PLAYERS CONCERTS

Nov. 30, 2009 - Gubaidulina - Quasi Hoquetus, Duo Sonata, David Rakowski - Hyperblue,

Oct. 30, 2009 - Schnittke - Piano Quintet, Bashoof - In Shadow, Light, Mellits - 11 Pieces for Flute and Piano, Arvo Part - Fratres,

Apr. 6, 2009 - Jared Miller - Nightmare at the Disco (stg qtet),Martin Ritter - (2 perc), Arvin Fekri - Brass Trio

Apr. 3, 2009 - Marc Mellits - Five Machines, Gyorgy Ligeti - Horn Trio, Conor Stuart - Sax Trio

Mar. 13, 2009 - Paul Levasseur - Eidolon, Ryo Noda - Mai, Jin Paik - Lovell No. 1, Reginald Smith-Brindel - Polifemo de oro, Arvin Fekri - No Words Anymore, Gyorgy Ligeti - Horn Trio

Feb. 5, 2009 - Ali Askin - Some Body's Music, John Psathas - Fragments, Improlab - Improv, Dutilleux - Choral et variations.

Nov. 17, 2008 - George Crumb - Music for a Summer Evening, Penderecki - String Trio, Improlab - Improv, Ligeti - Horn Trio, Rzewski - Spots, Alexina Louie - Cadenzas.

Dr. Hamm's students have been accepted to study at such institutions as The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Juilliard School of Music, University of Toronto, McGill University, The Glenn Gould School of Music, Boston University, The Mozarteum (Salzburg), The Banff Centre for the Arts, ARIA Music Academy, Orford Summer Music Academy, Beijing Summer Music Academy, The University of Alberta, among others.